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Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

Book by Geoff Dyer · 1 quotes · Childfree, Children, Humor

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Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids Quotes

“A number of children kept coming over to the tennis courts, rattling on the gate, and trying to get in. The watching middle-class mums did nothing to restrain them. Eventually my friend yelled, “Go AWAY!” Whereupon the watching mums did do something. A mob of them descended on us as though my friend had exposed himself. Suddenly we were in the midst of a maternal zombie film. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to getting lynched—they were after my friend rather than me and though, strictly speaking, I was his opponent, I was a tacit accomplice—and a clear demonstration that the rights of parents and their children to do whatever they please have priority over everyone else’s. “A child is the very devil,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a letter, “calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents.”

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Book:Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
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