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Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

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
Left
Dues
Humans
Cat
Different
Guilt
Lifetime
Sediment
Sorrow
Compounded
Quite
Helplessness
Knowing
Behalf
Pain
Cats

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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
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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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I never stopped reading.
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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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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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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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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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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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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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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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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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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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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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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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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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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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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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