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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.

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
First
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Think
Fronts
Thinking
Authority
Trenches
World
War
Automatic
People
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Incompetence
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Practically
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More quotes by Doris Lessing

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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
Doris Lessing
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
Doris Lessing
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
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Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
Doris Lessing
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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing
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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
Doris Lessing
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September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
Doris Lessing
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
Doris Lessing
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
Doris Lessing
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
Doris Lessing
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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
Doris Lessing
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
Doris Lessing