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

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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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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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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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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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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
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A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
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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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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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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 don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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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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