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

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
Doris Lessing
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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
Doris Lessing
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There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
Doris Lessing
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
Doris Lessing
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
Doris Lessing
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
Doris Lessing
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I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
Doris Lessing