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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.

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
Life
Thousand
Interesting
Reason
Live
Delightful
Wells
Satisfying
Well
Center
Children
Shouldn
Things
Spring

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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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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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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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.
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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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[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
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It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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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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Curse not the king, no not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
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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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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
Doris Lessing