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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.

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
Full
Area
Marsh
Small
Monsters
Marshes
Dark
Unconscious
Ankles
White
Areas
Psychiatry
Great
Reach
Lit
Trying
Conscious
Grab
View
Drag
Views
Describe

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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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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Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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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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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
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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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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
Doris Lessing
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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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 didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing