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"When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue."
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"She knew Neal loved her. Good for him for realizing it wasn't enough to make him happy. That was very mature of him. He was probably saving them both a lot of heartache."

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

"But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart."

"A man learns with age, if he is lucky."

"Raging over something that is invaluable can portray an individual's sense of immaturity and lack of understanding about his or her actual needs for survival."

"You know what the worst thing about adults is? ...They're not always adults. But that's what I like about them."

"You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness."
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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