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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
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Doris Lessing
It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
Doris Lessing
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
Doris Lessing
there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
Doris Lessing
All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Doris Lessing
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
Doris Lessing
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
Doris Lessing
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
Doris Lessing
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
Doris Lessing
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
Doris Lessing
Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
Doris Lessing
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
Doris Lessing
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
Doris Lessing
Better Counsel comes overnight.
Doris Lessing
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
Doris Lessing
