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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
People
Young
Incompetence
Persons
Practically
Person
Reaction
Firsts
Reactions
First
Began
Think
Fronts
Thinking
Authority
Trenches
World
War
Automatic

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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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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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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 wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
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Curse not the king, no not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
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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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Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
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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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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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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