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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

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
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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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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
Doris Lessing
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What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
Doris Lessing
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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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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.
Doris Lessing
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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
Doris Lessing
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing