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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Truth
Truths
Great
Accept
Always
Spend
Men
Accepting
People
Stupid
Known
Fighting
Lives
Slightly

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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
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The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
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I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
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A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
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