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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.

-Doris Lessing

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If She Had Been

Doris Lessing

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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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Perhaps It Is A Fault Of The Species Who Thrive In Peace, Mutual Help, Aspirations For More Of The Same -- To Forget That Outside These Borders Dwell Very Different Types Of Mind, Feeding On Different Fuel.

As The Fishes That Are Taken In An Evil Net, And As The Birds That Are Caught In The Snare; So Are The Sons Of Men Snared In Evil Time, When It Falleth Suddenly Upon Them.

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I Don't Think San Francisco Needs Defending. I Never Meet Anyone Who Doesn't Love The Place, Americans Or Others.

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After A Certain Age - And For Some Of Us That Can Be Very Young - There Are No New People, Beasts, Dreams, Faces, Events: It Has All Happened Before.

An Interim Report - That Is What An Autobiography Is.

A Writer Falls In Love With An Idea And Gets Carried Away.

Falling In Love

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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 Changing Desires. Of Course, That Is Only A Description Of Being Young.

... If You Have Nothing, You Are Free To Choose Among Dreams And Fantasies.

People Who Love Literature Have At Least Part Of Their Minds Immune From Indoctrination. If You Read, You Can Learn To Think For Yourself.

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I'm Always Astounded At The Way We Automatically Look At What Divides And Separates Us. We Never Look At What People Have In Common.

Laughter Is By Definition Healthy.

Things Are Not Quite So Simple Always As Black And White.

Black And White

Anna Was Saying To Herself: Why Do I Always Have This Awful Need To Make Other People See Things As I Do? It's Childish, Why Should They? What It Amounts To Is That I'm Scared Of Being Alone In What I Feel.

A Public Library Is The Most Democratic Thing In The World. What Can Be Found There Has Undone Dictators And Tyrants.

The 1960s Was Probably The First Time In History That Young People Were Recognized As A Big Group Of Consumers And As A Commercial Proposition For Madison Avenue. Advertising Played A Major Role In Creating The Ethos Of That Era - The Idea That, "here It Is, And You Can Have It Now." I Know That Many Kids Thought That The Ethos Of The 1960s Was Due To Their Own Peculiar Virtues, But, In Fact, It Had A Lot To Do With The Realities Of The Marketplace And Commerce.

Mother's Room, And Mother's Need For Privacy Become A Valuable Lesson In Respect For Other People's Rights.

That Is What Learning Is. You Suddenly Understand Something You've Understood All Your Life, But In A New Way.

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.

I Have Kept Diaries, Of Course, But They Can't Be Read For Quite A Long Time. I'm Always Curious About People Who Are Fascinated By Writers' Lives. It Seems To Me That We're Always In Our Books, Quite Nakedly. I Wonder, Too, Does The Private Life Really Matter? Who Cares What Is Known About You And What Isn't? Even When You Make Public Something That's Been Private, Most People Don't Get It - Not Unless They're The Same Generation And Have Gone Through More Or Less The Same Experiences. So, In A Sense, We're All Private, By Definition.

Hitler Admired Stalin, Quite Properly Seeing Himself As A Mere Infant In Crime Compared To His Great Exemplar.

Any Human Anywhere Will Blossom In A Hundred Unexpected Talents And Capacities Simply By Being Given The Opportunity To Do So.

I Wanted To Write About My Mother As She Should Have Been If She Had Not Been Messed Up By World War I.

At Last I Understood That The Way Over, Or Through This Dilemma, The Unease At Writing About 'petty Personal Problems' Was To Recognize That Nothing Is Personal, In The Sense That It Is Uniquely One's Own. Writing About Oneself, One Is Writing About Others, Since Your Problems, Pains, Pleasures, Emotions—and Your Extraordinary And Remarkable Ideas—can't Be Yours Alone. [...] Growing Up Is After All Only The Understanding That One's Unique And Incredible Experience Is What Everyone Shares.

There Are Many Feminists Who Work In The Media, And They Think That Feminism Is Very Important. It Is In Their Own Lives, But Mostly Feminism Has Had An Impact Among Privileged Women In The Advanced Western Countries. For The Most Part, It Hasn't Begun To Touch The Lives Of Poor And Working Women In The Third World, And That Distresses Me.

I Do Not Think Writers Or Anybody Would Sit Down And Think They Must Write About Some Cause, Or Theme, Or Something. If They Write About Their Own Experiences, Something True Is Going To Emerge.

You Have To Deduce A Person's Real Feelings About A Thing By A Smile She Does Not Know Is On Her Face, By The Way Bitterness Tightens Muscles At A Mouth's Corner, Or The Way Air Is Allowed To Flow From The Lungs.

What The Feminists Want Of Me Is Something They Haven't Examined Because It Comes From Religion. They Want Me To Bear Witness.

It Has Become A Kind Of Religion That You Can't Criticise Because Then You Become A Traitor To The Great Cause, Which I Am Not. It Is Time We Began To Ask Who Are These Women Who Continually Rubbish Men. The Most Stupid, Ill-educated And Nasty Woman Can Rubbish The Nicest, Kindest And Most Intelligent Man And No One Protests ... Men Seem To Be So Cowed That They Can't Fight Back, And It Is Time They Did.

I Never Stopped Reading.

September 11 Was Terrible, But If One Goes Back Over The History Of The Ira, What Happened To The Americans Wasn't That Terrible.

There's Always This Sense Of Incredulity That Writers Feel, Because They're Usually Living Flat And Ordinary Lives, Because They Have To.

We Have Not Yet Developed A System Of Education That Is Not A System Of Indoctrination.

It Is Our Stories That Will Recreate Us, When We Are Torn, Hurt, Even Destroyed. It Is The Storyteller, The Dream-maker, The Myth-maker, That Is Our Phoenix, That Represents Us At Our Best, And At Our Most Creative.

Once I Read Autobiography As What The Writer Thought About His Or Her Life. Now I Think, 'this Is What They Thought At That Time'. An Interim Report - That Is What An Autobiography Is.

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.

This Is A Catastrophic Universe, Always; And Subject To Hidden Reversals, Upheavals, Changes, Cataclysms, With Joy Never Anything But The Song Of Substance Under Pressure Forced Into New Forms And Shapes.

I'll Be Pleased When I'm Dead. That Will Let Me Off Worrying About All These Wars.

There Are No Laws For The Novel. There Never Have Been, Nor Can There Ever Be.

For The Last Third Of Life There Remains Only Work. It Alone Is Always Stimulating, Rejuvenating, Exciting And Satisfying.

All Political Movements Are Like This - We Are In The Right, Everyone Else Is In The Wrong. The People On Our Own Side Who Disagree With Us Are Heretics, And They Start Becoming Enemies. With It Comes An Absolute Conviction Of Your Own Moral Superiority. There's Oversimplification In Everything, And A Terror Of Flexibility.

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 Limiting Themselves.

Better Counsel Comes Overnight.

Charity Has Always Been A Expression Of The Guilty Consciences Of A Ruling Class.

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.

There Are Two Kinds Of Humanity, Those Who Dream And Those Who Don't, And Both Tend To Despise, Or To Tolerate, The Other.

It's Amazing What You Find Out About Yourself When You Write In The First Person About Someone Very Different From You.

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.

It Is My Belief That Children Are Full Of Understanding And Know As Much As And More Than Adults, Until They Are About Seven, When They Suddenly Become Stupid, Like Adults.

Writers Do Not Come Out Of Houses Without Books.

So Love Is Rest? The Cosy Corner? The Little Nook? Sometimes It Ought To Be. Sometimes It Is.

One Novel In Five Hundred Or A Thousand Has The Quality A Novel Should Have To Make It A Novel -- The Quality Of Philosophy.

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