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It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.

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
Country
Borders
Brought
Outside
Absurdities
System
Remark
Quite
Contradictions
Difficult
Remarks
Easy
Absurdity
Social
Contradiction

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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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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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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 write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
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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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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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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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