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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

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
Behind
Moral
Always
Indignation
Hidden
Envy
Behinds

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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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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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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.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
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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.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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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.
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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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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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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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