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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
People
Freeze
Terror
Everywhere
Conscious
Dying
Dead
Society
Fear
Freezes

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In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
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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 most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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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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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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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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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.
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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.
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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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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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