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"Younger woman says, 'I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad.'Yes, [older woman responds] 'I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?"
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"We are all worms but I do believe that I am a glow-worm."

"Songs of myselfI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,.."

"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

"Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that."

"She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two."

"But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down."
Explore more quotes by Doris Lessing

"There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful."

"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."

"I was realizing something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to their flat at all: that the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is.Nelson is about to leave his wife; he will never leave her. She will wail at being rejected and abandoned; she does not know she will never be rejected."

"You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so."

"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."

"The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind."

"Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing."

"With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how."
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