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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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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
Really
Grown
Merely
Parents
Parent
Understand
Years

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You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
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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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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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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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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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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
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You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
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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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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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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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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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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.
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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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