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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing -
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing -
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.
Doris Lessing -
Laughter is by definition healthy.
Doris Lessing -
As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.
Doris Lessing -
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
Doris Lessing -
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
Doris Lessing
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For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
Doris Lessing -
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 -
I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
Doris Lessing -
None of you ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing -
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.
Doris Lessing -
You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
Doris Lessing
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Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing -
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing -
The human race has been telling stories since it began.
Doris Lessing -
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
Doris Lessing -
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.
Doris Lessing -
I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
Doris Lessing
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When there's a war, people get married.
Doris Lessing -
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
Doris Lessing -
What they critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
Doris Lessing -
You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.
Doris Lessing