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

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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
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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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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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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
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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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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
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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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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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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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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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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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September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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