“I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world. And I don’t want to hear, when I’ve had an encounter with some mogul in the film industry, who wields the kind of power over men’s minds that no emperor ever did, and I come back feeling trampled on all over, that Lesbia felt like that after an encounter with her wine-merchant. And I don’t want to be told when I suddenly have a vision (though God knows it’s hard enough to come by) of a life that isn’t full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the day that this is simply the old dream of the golden age brought up to date …”

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About Doris Lessing

British novelist

Doris Lessing was a British novelist, born in Iran and later associated with Southern Rhodesia and England. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 and is known for fiction shaped by displacement, political questionings, and changing personal and social worlds. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing, the five-volume Children of Violence sequence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and the five books of Canopus in Argos: Archives. Her work often engages with society, ideology, and the pressures placed on individual lives.

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Books by Doris Lessing

The Golden Notebook

1962

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Alfred and Emily

2008

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Ben, in the World

2000

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Mara and Dann

1999

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The Summer Before the Dark

1973

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