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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.

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
Away
Charm
Nature
Thrown
Power
Spending
Spendthrift
Giving
Role
Superfluous
Something
Roles
Extra
Grace
Extras
Free
Unnecessary
Given
Essentially

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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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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I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
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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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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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Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
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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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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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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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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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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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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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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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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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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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