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

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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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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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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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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
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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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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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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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There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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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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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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I never stopped reading.
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