quotations about birth
What, shall such traces of my birth appear,
And I not follow them! It may not be.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus the King
From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH
Of Woman Born
Man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, on which the culture writes its text.
ERICH FROMM
Marx's Concept of Man
How you approach birth is intimately connected with how you approach life.
WILLIAM SEARS
The Pregnancy Book
Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers--strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength.
BARBARA KATZ ROTHMAN
A Bun in the Oven
Amnesia is a condition that enables a woman who has gone through labor to have sex again.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
attributed, The 2,320 Funniest Quotes
Birth is like death: nothing prepares you for it. It doesn't matter whether you are stocking up on swaddling clothes or winding sheets, when the event happens there aren't many people who can simply take it in their stride and carry on as normal.
KATE KONOPICKY
A Woman of No Importance
By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.
DIANE SETTERFIELD
The Thirteenth Tale
Everything that came after that first bright moment of birth is like an unbroken chain from which everything we know was given its form and meaning.
BOB ALBA
The Book of Love
Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she abandon to cries and lamentations.
PLINY THE ELDER
Natural History
The energy it took to exit mother’s womb is the same force required to manifest a dream ... a different kind of struggle. Push, push, push!
T. F. HODGE
From Within I Rise
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
SAM LEVENSON
attributed, The 2,320 Funniest Quotes
I believe the moment of birth
Is when we have knowledge of death
I believe the season of birth
Is the season of sacrifice.
T. S. ELIOT
The Family Reunion
He is born naked, and falls a whining at the first.
ROBERT BURTON
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Who breathes, must suffer; and who thinks, must mourn;
And he alone is bless'd, who ne'er was born.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Solomon on the Vanity of the World