The Children Act Quotes
"Wealth mostly failed to bring extended happiness."
"It was the larger estates that came to the High Court."
"Parents soon learned the new vocabulary and patient procedures of the law, and were dazed to find themselves in vicious combat with the one they once loved."
"Welfare, happiness, well-being must embrace the philosophical concept of the good life."
"The intricate web of a child’s relationships with family and friends was the crucial ingredient."
"Life accelerating to people a small village clustered on a baby grand."
"Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel."
"Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless."
"The law itself had similar problems when it allowed doctors to suffocate, dehydrate or starve certain hopeless patients to death, but would not permit the instant relief of a fatal injection."
"For a while, some part of her had gone cold, along with poor Matthew. She was the one who had dispatched a child from the world, argued him out of existence in thirty-four elegant pages."
"Never mind that with his bloated head and unsqueezing heart he was doomed to die."
"Perhaps it was perverse to discover in this sudden interruption a promise of freedom."
"These days, finding out for yourself was highly unconventional."
"The old system, slow and inefficient, preserved the human touch."
"If the parents could not agree, the law, reluctantly, must take the decisions."
"Above all, the duty of the court was to enable the children to come to adulthood and make their own decisions about the sort of life they wanted to lead."
"He must ask himself why he would deny his daughters the opportunity of a profession."
"The warm water flowing over her hands was soothing and held her at the sink for a blank minute or so."
"The light was gloomy green and the city air was cool against her cheeks."
"The consequence of man-made climate change, of melting sea ice disturbing the upper air, or irregular sunspot activity that was no one’s fault, or natural variability, ancient rhythms, the planet’s lot."
"Just loveliness, purified. Or love in its vaguest, largest form, for all people, indiscriminately."
"Her childlessness was a fugue in itself, a flight—this was the habitual theme she was trying now to resist—a flight from her proper destiny."
"She knew the game was up; she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ."
"But to belong to the law and all its historical accumulation bound one closer to things as they stood. Even as you resisted or denied it."
"To be caught out enacting her part in a cliché showed poor taste rather than a moral lapse."
"Treatment without consent would constitute a trespass of the person, or indeed an assault of that person."
"His objection to being transfused is based on the doctrines of a religious cult for which he may well become a pointless martyr."
"These days, blood products are tested to the highest standards."
"Nevertheless, it would not be wholly irrational to hesitate before accepting to be transfused."
"Isn’t it the case that Jehovah’s Witness patients are regularly treated now by what’s called bloodless surgery? No transfusions are necessary."
"Bloodless surgery has come to represent good practice, and in the future it may well be the accepted standard of care."
"You have to understand that blood is the essence of what’s human. It’s the soul, it’s life itself."
"Blood stands for the gift of life that every living soul should be grateful for."
"He’ll take his place in the kingdom of heaven on earth that’s to come."
"The existence of the patient’s right to make his own decision may be seen as a basic human right, protected by the common law."
"If you don’t believe in God you shouldn’t be talking about what does or doesn’t please him."
"I’d hate it, I’d hate it. But if that’s what happens I have to accept it."
"You listen carefully to what this lady has to say."
"To treat an adult against his will is to commit the criminal offense of assault."
"Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another."
"It is precisely this power that gives me pause, for A, at seventeen, has sampled little else in the turbulent realm of religious and philosophical ideas."
"It will not promote his welfare to suffer an agonizing unnecessary death, and so become a martyr to his faith."
"In short, I find that A, his parents and the elders of the church have made a decision which is hostile to A’s welfare, which is this court’s paramount consideration."
"His childhood has been an uninterrupted monochrome exposure to a forceful view of the world and he cannot fail to have been conditioned by it."
"Once easy companions became artful combatants crouching behind counsel, oblivious to the costs."
"They were terse and competitively polite when obliged to confer on household matters, avoided meals together, worked in separate rooms, each distracted by raw awareness through the walls of the other’s radioactive presence."
"A movement as near-imperceptible as continental drift."
"But there are ways of setting down a cup on a table, from the peremptory clip of china on wood to a sensitive noiseless positing."
"It’s amazing that people like you could waste your time on me. I was such an idiot!"
"All of life and love that lie ahead of him—that’s what you wrote. That was your ‘thing.’"
"This is how we’re signing our names in the geological record."
"When much of the oceans had sunk into the earth’s mantle and there wasn’t enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to sustain plants and the surface of the world was lifeless rocky desert, what evidence would a visiting extraterrestrial geologist find of our civilization?"
"A few feet below the ground a thick dark line in the rock would mark us off from all that had gone before."