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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
Book
Dropping
Way
Bores
Browse
Drag
Skipping
Library
Bookshops
Parts
Libraries
Books
Bore
Reading
Picking
Read
Attract

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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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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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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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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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Doris Lessing
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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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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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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We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Doris Lessing