Peter Ackroyd Quotes

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

I was born Gaynor Hopkins, one of seven children. My mum, Elsie, and dad, Glyndwr, always said they had seven children, although my sister Paulene was stillborn.

The death of a child is an incredible tragedy all over the world. Back in 1990, about 12 percent of children were dying before they reached the age of 5.

You'd see little shallow graves, lined up, one after the other - babies. That's what happens when measles goes through a nutritionally deficient community. It's a horrible disease, and it spreads incredibly efficiently.

As I grow older, I have a growing curiosity about my other half. My dad did a wonderful job raising me, and I wouldn't change it for the world, but at the same time there is a growing curiosity about my other half.

I have my three brothers, and then I have my adopted sister from El Salvador, who is actually the oldest. My brother and I were already born, and then my parents adopted my sister from El Salvador during the war and had two more kids.

My mother had lots and lots of children who didn't survive.

I was born five days before D-Day in 1944. My father was a mechanical engineer, which was a reserved occupation, so he didn't have to enlist. My mother was a housewife. She worked in a bank before marrying my father.

My sister was a twin, and the other baby died in childbirth, and I was three at the time, and I always kind of thought it haunted me. It was a weird thing. My dad was an ob-gyn, and so it was confusing that the other baby didn't come home from the hospital.

My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.

My father was one of ten children.

My grandmother died in childbirth, and my great-aunt lived with us. She had bound feet. She never knew how to read or write.

In large part, thanks to widespread immunization, the number of young children dying each year has declined significantly, from approximately 14 million in 1979 to slightly less than eight million in 2010.

Historians once assumed that when childhood mortality was high, people must not have loved their children very much; it would have been too painful. Research has since proved that assumption wrong.

My mum had 14 pregnancies - but only four of us survived. We had a little sister born for a few days and she died. There had to be a funeral.

There's tons of members of the Carradine family. It's more like a clan than it is like a family, and it's rare that we can get a bunch of them together. We do once in a while.

My Welsh grandmother Mair didn't meet my grandfather until she was 28, quite old to be unmarried in the early '40s.

I talked to my mother about it a lot. I asked her what it was like to grow up in New York and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and I asked her about a woman leaving her husband. I asked her about how she would feel about that woman, and my mother grew up in the Church Of God In Christ, and she told me that the woman might be isolated because the other women thought she might go and come after their husbands. That's how they thought then.

It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.

You know, more children die under the age of five when the parents are not educated.

Most people are not updated. 50 years ago 1 in 5 children died before age 5, now only 1 in 20!

I would like more sisters, that the taking out of one, might not leave such stillness.

More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.

the experience of having brothers and sisters, born of the same parents, sleeping under the same roof, eating at the same table, is an inescapable, delightful and repelling, desired and abhorred part of each child's life.

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.