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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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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
Practice
Point

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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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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
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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.
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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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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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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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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
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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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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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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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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.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Doris Lessing
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
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What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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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