birth Quotes

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.”

“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”

“But how do you know when the tracing looks bad enough? Which is worse, being born too early or waiting too long to deliver? ‘Judgment call.’ What a call to make. In my life, had I ever made a decision harder than choosing between a French dip and a Reuben? How could I ever learn to make, and live with, such judgment calls?”

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither.

“You’re born and you keep getting older and grayer and sicker, and no matter what efforts you make to reverse the process, you die, every single time. To repeat: worse, worse, worse, and then death. I have a long way to go before the worst. This is only the beginning.”

“I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps, from the hour I was born.”

″Basically, disappointment, embarrassment, and all these places where we just cannot feel good are a sort of death. We’ve just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it together and feel that we’re on top of things. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.″

“My dad told me that when I was born my cheeks were so fat the doctors didn’t know which end to spank.”

“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”

“For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.”

“It’s easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”

“The woman’s stomach stuck up so high I couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in the high stirrups and all the time the baby was being born she never stopped making this unhuman whooping noise.”

“Truly oh Gilgamish he is born in the fields like thee. The mountains have reared him.”

“Birth means nothing where there is no virtue.”

“I saw the old woman who had delivered me from my mother’s womb. I knew she held the secret of my destiny.”

“Nobody’s going to save you. No one’s going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. No one’s going to storm the castle walls nor kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, nor mount you onto the white steed. There is no one who will feed the yearning. Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.”

“She’s green, you mean. It’s a she, for heaven’s sake. ”

″‘Don’t tell me from genetics. What’ve they got to do with it?’ said Crowley. ‘Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you’re going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he’ll grow up to be a demon just because his dad became one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.‘”

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”

“She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year; the disastrous night of her life at Trantridge with its dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby’s birth and death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some share.”

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

“Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling...with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction and time is its only measure.”

“It is as natural to die as it is to be born.”

“Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.”

“The evil genius of darkness presided at its birth, it came forth under the veil of mystery, its true features being carefully concealed, and every deceptive art has been and is practicing to have this spurious brat received as the genuine offspring of heaven-born liberty.”

“And then one day, after the longest (and somehow, shortest) nine months of your life you get to take part in a miracle. It’s a blur of pain (which you promptly forget) and joy (which you remember forever). And then, suddenly, you’re cradling a tiny bundle in your arms.”

“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.”

“I have had high times. But the best times of all were afterward, just afterward, with the gun warm in my hand, the bite of smoke in my nose, the taste of death on my tongue, my heart high in my gullet, the danger past, and then the sweat, suddenly, and the nothingness, and the sweet clean feel of being born.”

“It is true. Despereaux’s eyes should not have been open. But they were. He was staring at the sun reflecting off his mother’s mirror. The light was shining on the ceiling in an oval of brilliance, and he was smiling up at the sight.”

“Not once had there been such eyes, such a nose, such silly, wiggle, wonderful toes.”

“Heaven blew every trumpet and played every horn on the wonderful, marvelous night you were born.”

“But Missis didn’t have just one puppy. Or two. Or three. She had fifteen!”

“When the polar bears heard, they danced until dawn.”

“On the night you were born, the moon smiled with such wonder that the stars peeked in to see you and the night wind whispered, ‘Life will never be the same.’ ”

“So enchanted with you were the wind and the rain that they whispered the sound of your wonderful name.”

“It sailed through the farmland high on a breeze...over the ocean... and through the trees..until everyone hear and everyone knew of the one and only ever you.”

“In the great forest a little elephant is born. His name is Babar. His mother loves him very much. She rocks him to sleep with her trunk while singing softly to him.”

“My father took one look at me when I was born and must have thought I had the face of someone dignified and sad like an old-fashioned queen or a dead person, but what I turned out like in plain, not much there to notice.

″‘Never mind girl,’ she said to baby Kahu. ‘Your birth cord is here. No matter where you may go, you will always return. You will never be lost to us.‘”

“Work on your dash, honey. You know . . . that line between the year of your birth and the year of your death that shows up on the tombstone”

“Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. As she strokes and suckles and studies her son, she can’t help but pity him. She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived.”

“At birth Rosa was white and smooth, without a wrinkle, like a porcelain doll, with green hair and yellow eyes—the most beautiful creature to be born on earth since the days of original sin, as the midwife put it, making the sign of the cross.”

“Your birth, Will, completed a circle that has been growing for four thousand years in every oldest part of this land: the circle of the Old Ones. Now that you have come into your power, your task is to make that circle indestructible.”

“On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone. In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses. Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul.”

“Want is our companion from birth to death, familiar as the seasons or the earth.”

“The Angel that presided o’er my birth Said, ‘Little creature, form’d of Joy and Mirth, Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth.”

“He looked in the birth and death room. It was once more used for storage. It seemed strange beyond belief that he had ever lain so long in the room. And in a way he had died in that room; at least something had happened and the bright little silversmith’s apprentice was no more. He stood here again at the threshold, but now he was somebody else.”

But when the Lama says they have been drawn to him by destiny, and insists that Theodore, Mrs Jones, and her young Chinese courier Lung hold the clue to the birth of the long-awaited Tulku, or reincarnated spiritual master, there seems to be no escape.

“All destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure.”

“The All of a Kind family faces hardship as they confront illness, disappointment and war, and the joys of reunion, birth, and growing up.”