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

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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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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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
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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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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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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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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
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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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