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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.

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
Living
Preserving
Means
Mask
Self
Town
Mean
Anywhere
Towns
Behinds
Behind
Small

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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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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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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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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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What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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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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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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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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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
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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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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
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