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

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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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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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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
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Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
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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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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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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
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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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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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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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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
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