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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
Learned
Pain
Fear
Young
Anguish
Things
Paid
Cost
Watches
Watch
More quotes by Doris Lessing
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
Doris Lessing
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
Doris Lessing
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Doris Lessing
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
Doris Lessing
None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing
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
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
Doris Lessing
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
Doris Lessing
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.
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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.
Doris Lessing
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing