Birth

[ The character Topsy speaking :] I s’pect I growed.

Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.

Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripp’d.

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream.

What then remains but that we still should cry For being born, and, being born, to die?

A grievous burden was thy birth to me; Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy.

My mother groaned! my father wept.

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

I s’pect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.

I came upstairs into the world; for I was born in a cellar.

There is a women at the beginning of all great things.

When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools.

My mother groan’d! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud, Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

The Angel that presided o’er my birth Said, “Little creature, formed of joy and mirth, Go love without the help of any thing on earth.”

What is the use of a new-born child?

Birth, and copulation, and death.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Wilson Mizner . . . recalls his embarrassment when he first came into the world, and found a woman in bed with him.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why .

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, But trailing clouds of glory do we come Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close

I had seen birth and death

The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.

The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?