What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.'' Phases, ' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.'' But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should? . Doris Lessing
About This Quote

The question of whether it's natural for women to see things in a continuous creative stream is a vexed one. Although many people claim that the character and temperament of babies and children reflect their mother's, this doesn't follow; we all know, for example, that some fathers are more like their sons than like their daughters, and vice versa. Similarly, although there is strong evidence that mothers and fathers really do see the world quite differently (and that this difference does affect parent-child relationships), it can't be assumed that there is any necessary link between gender and perception; we've all seen male and female members of different generations look at the same objects or situations with entirely different perspectives.

Source: The Golden Notebook

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More Quotes By Doris Lessing
  1. Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
  2. There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
  3. Listen Anna, if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there’s no hope for us. We’re going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.
  4. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
  5. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
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