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What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at 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
Really
Stick
Sticks
Capacity
Perhaps
Talent
Point
Others
Didn
Sticking

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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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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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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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The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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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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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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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.
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
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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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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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