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Doris Lessing Quotes
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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
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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.
Doris Lessing
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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
Doris Lessing
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.
Doris Lessing
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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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We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.
Doris Lessing
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Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.
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.
Doris Lessing
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
Doris Lessing
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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
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There are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
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If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.
Doris Lessing
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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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.
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Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
Doris Lessing
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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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It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
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If we were to put into practice what we know... but that is the point.
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I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.
Doris Lessing
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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.
Doris Lessing
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Doris Lessing
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Born:
October 22, 1919
Died:
November 17, 2013
(aged 94)
Bio:
Doris May Lessing was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer.
Known for:
The Golden Notebook (1962)
The Grass Is Singing (1950)
The Fifth Child (1988)
The Good Terrorist (1985)
Shikasta (1979)
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