Daily Inspiration Quote by David Hare

"Children always turn to the light" sounds like comfort until you notice how unsentimental it really is. Hare, a playwright with a journalist's allergy to easy consolation, compresses an entire moral argument into a stage direction disguised as a proverb. "Always" is the trap: it pretends to be nature, instinct, inevitability. But in drama, inevitability is never neutral. If children turn to the light, the adults in the room have no excuse for keeping the lights low.

The line carries a quiet indictment of power. Children, in Hare's world, are less symbols of innocence than instruments of exposure: they gravitate toward what is visible, warm, and true, and in doing so they embarrass the compromises that grown-ups call realism. Subtextually, it suggests that corruption has to be taught. You can condition people to accept darkness, but you start from a default setting that seeks clarity.

Context matters because Hare's work is so often about institutions - government, medicine, the church, the family - and the way they manage perception. Light is not just goodness; it's scrutiny. On a stage, light is attention: what we are forced to look at. Children "turn" not because they are virtuous saints, but because they haven't yet learned to avert their eyes.

There's also an implied fear hiding inside the reassurance. If children always turn to the light, what does it say about a culture that keeps producing adults who don't? The line isn't praising childhood; it's measuring adulthood against a standard it keeps failing.