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Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.
Doris Lessing
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Growing up involves recognizing the shared nature of individual experiences.

This quote by Doris Lessing encapsulates the essence of maturity as the realization that, despite our unique journeys, there are common threads that bind our experiences together. It suggests that personal growth is not just an individual endeavor but a collective understanding of the human experience and the emotions we all share.

Themes

Growing UpExperienceSharedUnderstandingLife Lessons

In practice

Example use cases

In a graduation speech to emphasize the importance of shared experiences.

More from Doris Lessing

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Doris LessingRead
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
Doris LessingRead
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
Doris LessingRead
There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
Doris LessingRead
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
Doris LessingRead
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Doris LessingRead

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