Birth

[ J. Cheever Loophole, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that every thing that is born of her is planted in her.

It was the winter wild While the Heav’n-born child All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.

This is the month, and this the happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heav’n’s eternal King, Of wedded maid and virgin mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring; For so the holy sages once did sing, That He our deadly forfeit should release, And with His Father work us a perpetual peace.

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

 

They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.

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.

I think I was cold in the womb.

 

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.

The human baby . . . is a mosaic of animal and angel.

In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

The naked, poor, and mangled Peace, Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births.

[ Telegram to Mary Sherwood, who finally had her baby after a much-ballyhooed pregnancy, 1915 :]

I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact.

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.

 

They will never allow, that a Child is under anyObligation to his Father for begetting him, or his Mother for bringing him into the World; which, considering the Miseries of human Life, was neither a Benefit in itself, nor intended so by his Parents, whose Thoughts in their Love-encounters were otherwise employed.

As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born, and that is all that is necessary.

Out of one man a race Of men innumerable.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.

Some men are born posthumously.