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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

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
Exciting
Literature
Great
Always
Critics
Periods

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
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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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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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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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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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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
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There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
Doris Lessing
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing
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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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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.
Doris Lessing