Parenting & Family Quote by Dennis Potter

Potter is mourning an amputation we’re trained to call “growing up.” The line turns childhood into a kind of first-language fluency: a deep, pre-theoretical knowledge of being human that isn’t earned through experience so much as delivered with the body itself. It’s not innocence in the greeting-card sense. It’s acuity. Children register feeling without the protective captions adults slap on it: irony, politeness, productivity, taste. When Potter says we “necessarily must lose” it, he’s accusing modern adulthood of being built on forgetting. Maturity isn’t just gaining skills; it’s acquiring filters that blunt perception.

The repetition (“the knowledge... that we have... that we have”) is doing work. It mimics the mind circling a truth it can’t quite pin down, like someone trying to recall a dream while awake. That slightly tangled syntax enacts the very loss he’s describing: adult language reaching for something childhood knew without having to explain.

Context matters. Potter, whose work repeatedly attacks the complacencies of British respectability and whose later years were marked by severe chronic illness, wrote from a place where the body’s raw facts could not be ignored. His dramas often stage a war between lived sensation and the scripts society hands us. The subtext: civilization depends on a bargain - you get membership, competence, and survival, but you pay with immediacy. What’s devastating here is the word “necessarily.” It’s not a complaint about bad parenting or a corrupt culture alone; it’s a structural tragedy. To become an adult is to trade unmediated aliveness for narrative control. Potter is asking whether we can recover that childhood knowledge without retreating into childishness - and whether art is the only place it can still speak.