"Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below"
About this Quote
The line works because it’s observational and accusatory at once. Orwell doesn’t sermonize about domineering parents or social institutions; he smuggles the indictment through a camera angle. “Looking upwards” quietly implies obedience, dependence, and the chronic neck-craning of the small toward the big. From below, faces loom, chins harden, nostrils flare: the body becomes architecture. Authority isn’t just felt, it’s seen, exaggerated by perspective until it reads as grotesque. The child, meanwhile, isn’t romanticized as morally superior; they’re simply trapped in a built-in bias.
Context matters: Orwell was obsessed with how ordinary experience primes people to accept domination - the classroom, the boarding school, the police station, the office. This is the micro-version of that thesis. The adult face, rendered unflatteringly, becomes an early lesson in how power can feel like ugliness even when it’s banal. That’s Orwell at his sharpest: a wry sensory detail that doubles as political anthropology, making oppression look less like a grand ideology and more like a bad angle you can never escape.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Such, Such Were the Joys (George Orwell, 1952)
Evidence: Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below. (Magazine appearance (pages not verified in the scan I found; issue commonly paginated around pp. 505–608 for the whole issue)). This line appears in Orwell’s autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.” The earliest publication of the essay that I can verify from reliable bibliographic references is its first publication in the U.S. journal Partisan Review, September–October 1952 (posthumous). The full-text online transcription at the Orwell.ru library includes the sentence verbatim (used here only to verify wording). For “first published,” the primary-source venue is the Partisan Review issue; later it appeared in book form (e.g., the 1953 U.S. collection titled Such, Such Were the Joys). Other candidates (1) The Collected Non-Fiction (George Orwell, 2017) compilation98.4% ... Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, a... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Orwell, George. (2026, February 26). Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/part-of-the-reason-for-the-ugliness-of-adults-in-35040/
Chicago Style
Orwell, George. "Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below." FixQuotes. February 26, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/part-of-the-reason-for-the-ugliness-of-adults-in-35040/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below." FixQuotes, 26 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/part-of-the-reason-for-the-ugliness-of-adults-in-35040/. Accessed 5 Mar. 2026.
