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

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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
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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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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
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You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
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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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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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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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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
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