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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.

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
Hundred
Novel
Thousand
Philosophy
Quality
Five
Make

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Doris Lessing
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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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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
Doris Lessing
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I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
Doris Lessing
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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
Doris Lessing
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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
Doris Lessing
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
Doris Lessing
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We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Doris Lessing
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It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
Doris Lessing
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
Doris Lessing
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
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Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
Doris Lessing
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing
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Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
Doris Lessing
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What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
Doris Lessing