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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

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
Story
Stories
Writing
Think
Pessimism
Thinking
Optimism
Telling
Terms
Term

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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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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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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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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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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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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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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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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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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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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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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
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