Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Bloch

A sentence that starts like a sentimental confession and ends like evidence. Bloch sets up the oldest self-myth in the book, the adult who claims to have "the heart of a child", then yanks the rug with a punchline so literal it turns cute into criminal. The joke works because it’s a trap: you’re invited to nod along to a familiar pose (innocence, wonder, arrested development), only to realize you’ve been accomplice to a horror reveal. Comedy and dread share a spine here; both depend on timing, misdirection, and the sudden snap of perspective.

The subtext is a sly indictment of performative purity. People love to advertise their inner child as moral alibi: I’m harmless, I’m playful, don’t take me too seriously. Bloch replies: fine, let’s take you literally. In a jar on a shelf isn’t just grotesque, it’s domestic grotesque. The shelf suggests a curated life, the jar suggests preservation, trophies, collections. Childlike feeling becomes an object to possess, display, and control, not something that animates you.

Context matters because Bloch is horror’s craftsman of the everyday nightmare, best known for Psycho and its suburban violence. His line channels mid-century anxieties about what’s hiding behind the normal facade: the killer as the neighbor, the monster as the neat collector. It also doubles as a meta-jab at writers themselves, who are often told to "keep the heart of a child" for imagination. Bloch’s wink: yes, and we might be the ones most adept at putting it somewhere cold and glassy, then calling it art.