A Quote by Doris Lessing

There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
The hardest bits of my book to read were the easiest bits to write because they were the most immediate. Probably because I had never stopped thinking about them on some level. Those bits I was just channelling and those were the most exciting writing days. The bits I found harder were the bits that happen in between, you know, the rest of living. There were whole years, whole houses, that I just got rid of.
I met this amazing person, and we realized we had very similar views on how we wanted to live our lives. It’s happened quickly, with so many children. Yesterday, picking up the kids from school, Brad turned around in the car, and there were three of them. He couldn’t stop laughing. We love them and are having a great time.
I've found that when I was young, all the pretty girls at school got all the dates and went to all the big parties and everything because they were pretty. They never bothered to develop anything. And as they aged, their prettiness faded and they were left as middle-aged women who were very, very unhappy and disappointed. But I can't feel sorry for them because that was their own doing.
These dear souls came not to Sabbath school because it was popular to do so, nor did I teach them because it was reputable to be thus engaged. Every moment they spent in that school, they were liable to be taken up, and given thirty-nine lashes. They came because they wished to learn. Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness. I taught them, because it was the delight of my soul to be doing something that looked like the bettering the condition of my race
What the majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis, it is not what you do for you children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.
People were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that's what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from.
Well, the people I've known I must say are extraordinary. When I think about some of them, I can't believe that I knew them all. And I think the reason I knew most of them at the beginning was because they were of Bogie's generation, 25 years my senior, not mine. But they were the most talented people of all.
Every generation likes to think that children don't read as much as they used to when they were young! You listen to some adults saying they were going around reading 'Ulysses' when they were seven or eight! I think children are voracious readers if you give them the right books and if you make those books accessible to them.
The most valuable blacks are those in prison, those who have the warrior spirit, who had a sense of being African. They got for their women and children what they needed when all other avenues were closed to them.
I'm sure you're gonna be taught, if you haven't already, that the people that were here, the Native Americans were beautiful, they were wonderful, they were at one with nature, and these evil white Europeans like Columbus came in and killed them and took them, imprisoned them, stole what was theirs, took it for ourselves.
I think if you were to talk to women who have run, both successfully and unsuccessfully, nearly all of them would say, "You learn so much." You learn about yourself, what you're capable of doing.... And it doesn't have to all happen when you're young - I mean, one of the most powerful women in American politics is Nancy Pelosi. She had five children. She didn't go into politics until her youngest child was in high school.... That's one of the great things about being a woman in today's world: You have a much longer potential work life than our mothers or our grandmothers did.
Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid... They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild - and what happened? The men wilted.
In China, I witnessed forced abortions and forced sterilizations performed on women who were told that the children they were carrying were 'illegal'. I went with them when they were arrested and remained with them as they were subjected to mind-bending psychological torture. And I accompanied them as they went in tears to the local clinic to have their pregnancies aborted.
Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck.
My very first school was a primary school in Surrey. I remember being taught to read by the traditional ABC, instead of look-say - that is, whole words at a time - which was fashionable when my children were at school.
In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up.
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