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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...
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
Parts
Libraries
Books
Bore
Reading
Picking
Read
Attract
Book
Dropping
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Bookshops
More quotes by Doris Lessing
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Doris Lessing
I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
Doris Lessing
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
Doris Lessing
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
Doris Lessing
The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
Doris Lessing
America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing
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
One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
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
I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
Doris Lessing
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
Doris Lessing
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Doris Lessing
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
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
