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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
Watch
Learned
Pain
Fear
Young
Anguish
Things
Paid
Cost
Watches

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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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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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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
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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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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
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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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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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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
Doris Lessing