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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.

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
Seems
Spend
Power
Deal
Strengthen
Come
Seem
Wondering
Good
Deals
Deliberate
Time
Wonder
Idle
People
Interest
Attempt
Eye
Judge
Use
Judging

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
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All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
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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 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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What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
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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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