Parenting & Family Quote by John Jakes

Jakes turns safety into a myth we briefly get to rent, then forces us to pay it back with interest. The engine of the passage is its ruthless logic: once you truly see how contingent life is, you can’t unsee it. “Never been safe” isn’t just an adult realization; it’s an accusation against the comforting stories we build - family, nation, faith, even routine - to make volatility feel like an exception instead of the rule. The repetition (“It comes from knowing...”) mimics a mind looping after a rupture, that post-trauma compulsion to return to the same conclusion because it still won’t land as emotionally real.

The subtext is less about an event than about a threshold. Jakes describes the moment innocence isn’t “lost” so much as revealed as a kind of selective blindness. “Ignorant” is doing double duty: it’s the sweetness of not knowing and the shame of realizing you didn’t know. That’s why the line about childhood hits hardest; it frames maturity not as growth but as exile. You don’t graduate into adulthood, you’re expelled from a protected narrative.

“Remembering heaven” is the twist that sharpens the cruelty. Hell isn’t fire; it’s contrast. If you can recall what it felt like to believe the world was arranged to keep you intact, then every later fear becomes a comparison to that vanished calm. In a writer like Jakes, steeped in historical scale and human fragility, the context isn’t abstract psychology; it’s the recurring lesson of catastrophe: knowledge doesn’t just inform - it permanently changes the shape of what comfort is allowed to mean.