Parenting & Family Quote by Graham Greene

Greene nails the particular cruelty of childhood misery: it has no calendar. Adults can count down to Friday, to graduation, to “when this project ends.” A child, trapped in the compressed universe of school and home, experiences time as weather. When it’s bleak, it’s not “for now,” it’s just how the world is. That’s the trick of the “dark tunnel” image: not just pain, but pain plus disorientation. You’re not only suffering; you can’t locate an exit.

The line about “thirteen weeks” is a masterstroke because it weaponizes a banal unit of institutional time. A school term is supposed to be neatly measurable, the kind of thing teachers and parents manage with syllabi and schedules. Greene flips it: measured time is irrelevant when you don’t believe in the future. The exaggeration (“might just as well be thirteen years”) isn’t melodrama; it’s an accusation about how adults misread children’s endurance. We treat kids as resilient because their problems look small from the outside, yet their emotional scale is absolute because their world is smaller.

Contextually, Greene’s work often circles guilt, boredom, claustrophobia, the sense of being watched and judged. This feels like the same moral psychology: institutions promising order while quietly manufacturing despair. The intent isn’t merely to evoke sympathy; it’s to force the adult reader to confront a failure of imagination. If a child can’t see an endpoint, then the system that insists “it’s only a term” becomes part of the darkness.