Top 70 Jennifer Worth Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all.”

— Jennifer Worth

2. “Life is short, enjoy it while you may.”

— Jennifer Worth

3. “The shell must be broken before the bird can fly.”

— Jennifer Worth

4. “Love doesn’t adhere to time and boundaries does it? It just is.”

— Jennifer Worth

5. “For just as the swan’s last song is the sweetest of its life, so loss is made endurable by love and it is love that will echo through eternity.”

— Jennifer Worth

6. “As everything slides away, what I am left with is faith and love. Faith, which has been the cornerstone of my life, and love, which has been always with me. Love of my husband; our love for each other; love of my daughters and my grandchildren, and their surpassing care of me. And overall, and around all, the love of God. Thanks be to God.”

— Jennifer Worth

7. “Human life is precious.’ ‘And human death is sacred. Or at least it should be – and would be, if we allowed it to be. In the short experience I have had, sitting with the dying, I can say that the last few hours are always peaceful, almost spiritual. Wouldn’t you call that a sacred time?”

— Jennifer Worth

8. “Now and then in life, love catches you unawares, illuminating the dark corners of your mind, and filling them with radiance. Once in awhile you are faced with a beauty and a joy that takes your soul, all unprepared, by assault.”

— Jennifer Worth

9. “The knowledge of rejection, of being unwanted, is more terrible to live with than anything else, and a rejected child will usually never get over it.”

— Jennifer Worth

10. “You cannot understand what you have not experienced.”

— Jennifer Worth

11. “Of course not,” she snapped sharply. “How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don’t even know? Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it? One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people.”

— Jennifer Worth

12. “Love permeated every nook and cranny, every corner and crevice of that little house. You could feel it as soon as you entered the front door, like a presence so tangible you could almost reach out and touch it.”

— Jennifer Worth

13. “I woke in the middle of the night, and he was standing at the side of my bed. He was as real as my husband sleeping beside me. He was tall, and upright, but looked younger than when I had known him, like a handsome man of about sixty or sixty-five. He was smiling, and then he said, “You know the secret of life, my dear, because you know how to love.”

— Jennifer Worth

14. “It did not occur to me at the time that her radiance had a spiritual dimension, owing nothing to the values of the temporal world.”

— Jennifer Worth

15. “Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I do not consider your government has any right to detain me as a prisoner. I have therefore decided to escape from your custody,’ and ending up: ‘I remain, sir, your humble and obedient servant, Winston Churchill.”

— Jennifer Worth

16. “Her constant phrase, “Go with God”, had puzzled me a good deal. Suddenly it became clear. It was a revelation – acceptance. It filled me with joy. Accept life, the world, Spirit, God, call it what you will, and all else will follow.”

— Jennifer Worth

17. “The impact Sister Julienne made upon me – and, I discovered, most people – was out of all proportion to her words or her appearance. She was not imposing or commanding, nor arresting in any way. She was not even particularly clever. But something radiated from her and, ponder as I might, I could not understand it. It did not occur to me at the time that her radiance had a spiritual dimension, owing nothing to the values of the temporal world.”

— Jennifer Worth

18. “One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people.”

— Jennifer Worth

19. “The young can be very lovely, but the faces of the old can be truly beautiful.”

— Jennifer Worth

20. “Good midwifery is a combination of art, science, experience, and instinct.”

— Jennifer Worth

21. “Health is the greatest of God’s gifts, but we take it for granted; yet it hangs on a thread as fine as a spider’s web and the tiniest thing can make it snap, leaving the strongest of us helpless in an instant.”

— Jennifer Worth

22. “That’s the trouble, I can’t forget him. He was everything to me, except mine.”

— Jennifer Worth

23. “So, like Jane Austen, who in all her writing never recorded a conversation between two men alone, because as a woman she could not know what exclusively male conversation would be like, I cannot record much about the men of Poplar, beyond superficial observation.”

— Jennifer Worth

24. “We must all commit Sister Monica Joan to our prayers. We must seek God’s help. But I will also engage a good lawyer.” I.”

— Jennifer Worth

25. “I have a theory that all human babies are born prematurely. Given the human life span – three score years and ten – to be comparable with other animals of similar longevity, human gestation should be about two years. But the human head is so big by the age of two that no woman could deliver it. So our babies are born prematurely, in a state of utter helplessness.”

— Jennifer Worth

26. “I remember the days of my youth when everything was new and bright; when the mind was always questing, searching, absorbing; when the pain of love was so acute it could suffocate, and the days when joy was delirious.”

— Jennifer Worth

27. “Oh – I shall remember the hours that we spent, In age I’ll remember, and not to repent.′ Sister Monica Joan is quoting someone else here, I don’t know who.”

— Jennifer Worth

28. “Life turns on little things. The momentous events in history can leave us untouched, while small events may shape our destinies.”

— Jennifer Worth

29. “Bah! Suffragettes. I’ve no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!”

— Jennifer Worth

30. “Faith is a private matter, usually held deep within a person, quiet, impossible to recognise or understand, if you have no faith yourself.”

— Jennifer Worth

31. “All nuns, by the very fact of their monastic profession, are exceptional people. No ordinary woman could live such a life. There must inevitably be something, or many things, that are outstanding about a nun.”

— Jennifer Worth

32. “God loves greatly those whom he requires to suffer greatly.”

— Jennifer Worth

33. “There is not a single dying human being who does not yearn for love, touch, understanding, and whose heart does not break from the withdrawal of those who should be drawing near.”

— Jennifer Worth

34. “I’ve loved someone since I was seventeen but I can’t have him and I can’t give him up. So until I can do that no one else will stand a chance.”

— Jennifer Worth

35. “And ‘woman’ in the slums is capable of taking on almost superhuman responsibility, from a very young age, that would crush most of us. Today they live in luxury – look at all the giddy young girls around us – they have no memory of how their mothers and grandmothers lived and died. They have no understanding of what it took to raise a family twenty or thirty years ago.”

— Jennifer Worth

36. “Sister Evangelina had plenty of homespun advice to offer her patients: “Where-ere you be, let your wind go free”, to which the reply was always chanted: “In Church and Chapel let it rattle”.”

— Jennifer Worth

37. “I am forced to the conclusion that modern medicine does not know it all.”

— Jennifer Worth

38. “Inanimate objects have a life of their own, especially when they are the daily companions of a living soul. Without that life, they take on a bleak, desolate appearance, like furniture piled up in a warehouse.”

— Jennifer Worth

39. “The dying need only a hand to hold and a quiet in which to make their departure.”

— Jennifer Worth

40. “Well, it certainly is for men, because large numbers of men living together can easily become like wild animals. Men are brutes at heart, and without the civilising influence of women they quickly revert to savagery.”

— Jennifer Worth

41. “Tread softly as you draw near to the bedside of a dying man, for the space around him is holy ground. Speak in hushed tones, with awe and reverence, as you would in a cathedral. Let not the mind engage in trivial thoughts. The awesome majesty of Death can only be met in silence.”

— Jennifer Worth

42. “I was in a Highland Regiment, as you know – the Scots Guards – and I’ll tell you something: there is nothing in the world like the sound of the bagpipes to raise a man’s morale, to lift his spirits, and give him strength. However tired and thirsty we were, the bagpipes at the front of the column only had to strike up and within seconds you felt your feet lift off the ground, your step lighten, your spirits rise, and every man-Jack was marching strong, in rhythm to the pipes.”

— Jennifer Worth

43. “These older generation mothers knew that they were absolutely indispensable at times like these, and it gave them a great sense of fulfilment, an ongoing purpose in life.”

— Jennifer Worth

44. “Quite honestly, a baby covered in blood, still slightly blue, eyes screwed up, in the first few minutes after birth, is not an object of beauty.”

— Jennifer Worth

45. “Something was nagging at me that I was trying to resist. Was it then or was it later that the thought came to me: if God really does exist, and is not just a myth, it must have a consequence for the whole of life. It was not a comfortable thought.”

— Jennifer Worth

46. “When you are young, you go where you wish, but when you are old, others will take you where you do not wish to go.”

— Jennifer Worth

47. “Handling a dead body is not a repugnant or frightening experience and, somehow, it helps to accept the fact that the soul of that person has gone if you treat the body with reverence and respect before it is finally disposed of by cremation or burial.”

— Jennifer Worth

48. “No one can give you faith. It is a gift from God alone. Seek and ye shall find. Read the Gospels. There is no other way.”

— Jennifer Worth

49. “Nothing binds people more strongly than the same sense of humour, and the ability to laugh together.”

— Jennifer Worth

50. “Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse.”

— Jennifer Worth