DORIS LESSING

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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.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook

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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.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook

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Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals.

DORIS LESSING

Interview with Herbert Mitgang, “Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life’s Puzzles,” The New York Times, April 22, 1984

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In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

DORIS LESSING
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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. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
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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.

DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
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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.

DORIS LESING
The Golden Notebook
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Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals.

DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
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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.

DORIS LESSING
The Grass is Singing
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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.

DORIS LESSING
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook
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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.