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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.

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
Pain
Fear
Young
Anguish
Things
Paid
Cost
Watches
Watch
Learned

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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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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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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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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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