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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
Watches
Watch
Learned
Pain
Fear
Young
Anguish
Things
Paid
Cost

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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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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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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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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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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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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
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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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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
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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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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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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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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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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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