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It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.

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
Dying
Dead
Society
Fear
Freezes
People
Freeze
Terror
Everywhere
Conscious

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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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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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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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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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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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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 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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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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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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