"When a generation watches the young ones, their……" — Doris Lessing
"When a generation watches the young ones, their future, their responsibility, grow up, and when what they are to inherit is pitiful and so reduced, then the shame of it goes too deep for reasoning. No, it was not our fault that our children had to learn suchhardship, had to forego so much that we, the older ones,had inherited. Our fault it was not; but we felt that it was. We were learning, we old ones, that in times when aspecies, a race, is under threat, drives and necessities built into the very substance of our flesh speak out in waysthat we need never have known about if extremities had not come to squeeze these truths out of us. An older, a passing, generation needs to hand on goodness, something fine and higheven if it is only in potentialto their children. And if there isn't this bequest to put into their hands, then there is a bitterness and a pain that makes it hard to look into young eyes, young faces."
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Doris Lessing
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201 Quotes by Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing has 201 quotes on this site.
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When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to…
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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being…
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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every…
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat…
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I…
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist:…
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Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group…
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was…
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More Bequest Quotes
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