Quote

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.

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
Make
Clear
Semi
Men
Lasts
Aloud
Last
Cowards
Often
Slaves
Overhear
Women
Coward
Gossiping
May
Complaining
Masochism
Thing
Kitchen
Grumbling
Long
Slave
Kitchens

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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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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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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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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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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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