Parenting & Family Quote by Mary Wesley

Wesley slips a quiet provocation into a seemingly gentle metaphor: adulthood, as commonly performed, is less a destination than a surrender. By insisting "we're all like children", she isn’t romanticizing innocence; she’s puncturing the social fantasy that maturity equals certainty. The line turns on a reversal. We expect growing up to mean competence, closure, answers. Wesley frames it as a kind of living burial: "being grown up is death" not because bodies fail, but because curiosity does.

The syntax does a lot of the work. "Stopping thinking" lands with blunt finality, then she stacks active verbs that refuse to sit still: "trying", "find out", "going on", "learning". It’s propulsion versus paralysis, a life defined by verbs rather than labels. The subtext is moral as much as psychological: the grown-up pose can become a defense against discomfort, a way to avoid being wrong, naive, or in need of revision. Children ask questions because they must; adults stop asking because they can pretend they don’t have to.

Context matters. Wesley didn’t publish her first adult novel until her seventies, after a lifetime of experience and constraint. That late-blooming career makes her mistrust of "grown-up" finality feel earned rather than cute. She’s arguing for a form of vitality that isn’t youthfulness, but permeability: the willingness to stay unfinished. In a culture that prizes "having it together", Wesley offers a harsher measure of aliveness - not stability, but sustained curiosity.