quotations about birth
All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
DIANE SETTERFIELD
The Thirteenth Tale
Life, birth, blood, doom
The hole in the ground is comin' 'round soon
BLACK LABEL SOCIETY
"Life, Birth, Blood, Doom"
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die--although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
ERICH FROMM
The Sane Society
I'm not interested in being Wonder Woman in the delivery room. Give me drugs.
MADONNA
attributed, The 2,320 Funniest Quotes
I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.
LAUREN DESTEFANO
Fever
When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Conduct of Life
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
MAY SARTON
Journal of a Solitude
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
TOM ROBBINS
Jitterbug Perfume
Birth and death--what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.
ROHINTON MISTRY
A Fine Balance
A natural birth is a manifestation of spontaneous expression and cannot be schooled, urged, or thrust upon a mode of living that is not natural. It requires only a clear channel, a body in health, a mind in understanding, a whole being that is totally open.
MARIA ROSENSTEIN
"The Yoga of Giving Birth," Yoga Journal, Nov. 1975
I had a Jewish delivery. They knock you out with the first pain and wake you up when the hairdresser shows.
JOAN RIVERS
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Humor
Birth is a gateway into the spiritual.
BRYANT CORTRIGHT
Psychotherapy and Spirit
He came into the world like a delivery that no one knew what to do with, and nobody wanted to sign for.
OBERT SKYE
Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born;
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Auguries of Innocence
Birth is a rite of passage and by the end of it you've been through it together and you're in relationship to the baby. The baby is what comes at the end of the process of giving birth, and I think the more connected I am with the birth, the more connected I am with the baby.
EDWARDS
attributed, Risk and Choice in Maternity Care
Into the world we come like ships,
Launch'd from the docks, and stocks, and slips,
For fortune fair or fatal!
THOMAS HOOD
Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg
Do you count your birthdays thankfully?
HORACE
Epistles
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?
PHILIP SIDNEY
Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney