Life & Wisdom Quote by V. S. Pritchett

A whole worldview is smuggled into that casual, almost offhand clause: "as far as we are concerned". Pritchett isn’t denying history so much as demoting it. The line has the dry snap of someone who’s seen how family narratives get weaponized - how ancestry becomes either a badge or a burden - and chooses, with quiet defiance, to opt out. It’s not amnesia; it’s a boundary.

The subtext is class-conscious and peculiarly British. In a culture where lineage can function like a second currency, declaring everything pre-birth "myth" is both comic and insurgent. Myth, after all, is what societies use to launder contingency into destiny. Pritchett’s family refuses the laundering. They won’t pretend to be inevitable, noble, or tragic in the old, rehearsed way. They were born; the rest is story, and stories can be revised, laughed at, or ignored.

The intent feels protective. By shrinking the past to folklore, he protects the living from being conscripted into inherited dramas: grudges, debts, origin legends. There’s also a writer’s wink here. Pritchett, a master of observing how ordinary lives manufacture meaning, knows that "myth" is not the opposite of truth; it’s truth arranged for comfort and status. The line works because it punctures the sentimental pieties of family history while leaving room for something sharper: self-invention. In a century marked by upheaval and social mobility, that stance isn’t just clever - it’s survival.