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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
Known
Fighting
Lives
Slightly
Truth
Truths
Great
Accept
Always
Spend
Men
Accepting
People
Stupid

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
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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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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
Doris Lessing
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
Doris Lessing
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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
Doris Lessing
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing