The Fifth Child Quotes

“...you can only value something if you've experienced it.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

“We are being punished, that’s all.” “What for?” he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated. “For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

“While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or a small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body... then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs... a small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting - a doll with chalky swollen limbs, its eyes wide and blank, like blue ponds, and its mouth open, showing a swollen little tongue. A lanky boy was skewed, one half of his body sliding from the other. A child seemed at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to scream at her.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

“She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

“Harriet’s parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

“We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

“He had decided not to be angry: it was killing him.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

“Sarah and William’s unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child—yes, yes, of course she knew one shouldn’t call them mongol.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

“Paul was even more difficult than Ben. But he was a normal “disturbed” child, not an alien.”
― Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child