Parenting & Family Quote by Virginia C. Andrews

Andrews goes straight for the kind of horror that doesn’t need ghosts: the stuff installed early, before you have language for it, when the world is all power and you’re mostly without any. The specificity matters. She doesn’t name flashy anxieties; she catalogs structural ones - helplessness, entrapment, loss of control - the three-part engine behind so much compulsive behavior and self-protective mythmaking. It reads like confession, but it’s also a blueprint for the emotional architecture of her fiction, where innocence is less a virtue than a vulnerability someone will exploit.

The line’s intent is not self-pity; it’s authority. By claiming these fears as “mine,” Andrews frames fear as possession and inheritance, something you carry the way you carry a family trait. “Deep-seated” signals that these aren’t moods you can talk yourself out of; they’re grooves in the psyche. The child isn’t just scared of monsters under the bed - the child is scared of the adult world’s ability to decide what happens to them. That’s the subtext: trauma as governance.

Contextually, Andrews wrote in a popular-gothic register that often centers on young women boxed in by family secrets, social cruelty, and bodily surveillance. This quote distills the genre’s promise: the real cage is not only the attic or the mansion, but the nervous system. “They never quite go away” lands with quiet fatalism, a refusal of neat catharsis. It’s not that we’re broken forever; it’s that the original alarm system keeps misfiring, and adulthood becomes a long negotiation with the child who still expects the door to lock.