Life & Wisdom Quote by Doris Lessing

Lessing’s line has the cool sting of a novelist who knows sentiment can be its own kind of self-deception. Parents aren’t framed as sacred anchors or lifelong guides; they’re rendered as a private mental technology, summoned and dismissed on demand. The comparison to “recurring dreams” does a lot of covert work: dreams are intimate, involuntary, and unreliable, stitched together from need rather than fact. To “enter into” them suggests agency - we choose the doorway - but only because the dream is already waiting in the psyche, looping until something changes.

The subtext is mildly accusatory and oddly tender at the same time. “We use” is blunt, almost transactional, making adulthood feel less like emancipation and more like a reshuffling of dependence into psychological habit. Even when parents are absent, disappointing, or dead, their presence persists as a reusable script: approval to seek, rebellion to reenact, a voice to argue with, a comfort to borrow. Lessing implies that the parent-child relationship doesn’t simply mature; it gets internalized and repurposed, sometimes opportunistically.

Context matters: Lessing’s work is preoccupied with the stories people tell themselves to survive - about family, politics, love, identity. The quote reads like an antidote to cozy family mythology, especially in a modern world where distance, rupture, and reinvention are common. It also hints at the ethical discomfort of it all: if parents become dreams we revisit “when needed,” what happens to them as real people, with needs of their own?