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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

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
Time
Suddenly
Son
Caught
Bird
Snare
Taken
Snares
Upon
Sons
Evil
Birds
Men
Fishes

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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.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
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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.
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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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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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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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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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[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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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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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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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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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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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
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