Quote

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

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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
America
Short
Intellectually
Country
Seem
Ruled
World
Rest
Spontaneity
Fun
Conformity
Present
Agendas
Probably
Police
Puritanical
Hate
Image
Appalling
Thought
Private
Hysterical

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
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I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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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.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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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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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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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.
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What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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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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September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
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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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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
Doris Lessing
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
Doris Lessing