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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
Always
Critics
Periods
Exciting
Literature
Great

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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
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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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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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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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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
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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.
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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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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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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