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98a4e64
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What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
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inspirational
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Doris Lessing |
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ed5d121
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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show h..
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feminism
education
knowledge-power
quip
school
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Doris Lessing |
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d150455
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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.
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kindness
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Doris Lessing |
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e92833b
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Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
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Doris Lessing |
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65670ae
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I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
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planning
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Doris Lessing |
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4cf7659
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Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.
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Doris Lessing |
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025aea8
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For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole be..
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Doris Lessing |
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15dc0c3
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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Doris Lessing |
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1020c53
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Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my chang..
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Doris Lessing |
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1001bd1
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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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Doris Lessing |
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97980d6
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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the Briti..
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Doris Lessing |
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54fdeca
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We are all creatures of the stars.
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origins
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Doris Lessing |
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cb9c669
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How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to...
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Doris Lessing |
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8c6ced2
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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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loneliness
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Doris Lessing |
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48ffb25
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I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by lim..
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Doris Lessing |
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cc79756
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I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.
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Doris Lessing |
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873031a
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If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.
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Doris Lessing |
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40d2709
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What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have..
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friendship
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Doris Lessing |
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96c6c87
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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
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Doris Lessing |
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bd35273
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People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
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Doris Lessing |
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a000d84
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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words. The..
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Doris Lessing |
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d4037c8
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Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them."
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men
women
freedom
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Doris Lessing |
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7cceeaa
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For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.
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Doris Lessing |
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e526895
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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Doris Lessing |
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4508358
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.
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reading
books
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Doris Lessing |
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c5d9ae9
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All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.
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sanity
gratitude
life
feeling
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Doris Lessing |
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156e7ba
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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Doris Lessing |
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7347f41
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The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. [...] She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded by five worshipppers, not at all afraid of us. Then she stalked around that floor of the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at h..
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kittens
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Doris Lessing |
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c98b133
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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
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suicide
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Doris Lessing |
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43a7557
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Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.
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Doris Lessing |
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3528de5
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We try to have things both ways. We've always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule?
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Doris Lessing |
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e1cec0e
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She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.
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Doris Lessing |
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d02d834
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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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Doris Lessing |
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49bf113
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I have you for being normal, I hate you for it. You're a normal human being. What right have you to that?
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Doris Lessing |
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4d82a60
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THE LILIES This morning it was, on the pavement, When that smell hit me again And set the houses reeling. People passed like rain: (The way rain moves and advances over the hills) And it was hot, hot and dank, The smell like animals, strong, but sweet too. What was it? Something I had forgotten. I tried to remember, standing there, Sniffing the air on the pavement. Somehow I thought of flowers. Flowers! That bad smell! I looked..
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nature
flowers
childhood
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Doris Lessing |
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7cae4f3
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That a work of the imagination has to be "really" about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be "about" something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase "political correctness" was..
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politics
leftism
political-correctness
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Doris Lessing |
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e0fbbd0
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The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.
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Doris Lessing |
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42cd13a
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Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history."
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time
science
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Doris Lessing |
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b4e277a
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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of suble air.
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Doris Lessing |
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4e11acd
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I am always amazed, in myself and in other women, at the strength of our need to bolster men up. This is ironical, living as we do in a time of men's criticizing us for being 'castrating', etc., -- all the other words and phrases of the same kind. (Nelson says his wife is 'castrating' -- this makes me angry, thinking of the misery she must have lived through.) For the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a ma..
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Doris Lessing |
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0649449
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In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.
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women
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Doris Lessing |
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701b35d
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Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again. Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the you..
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Doris Lessing |
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6a77e1e
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He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.
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Doris Lessing |
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8a48c38
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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--and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.
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Doris Lessing |