Birth
J.M. Barrie
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.
Jonathan Swift
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.
Konstantin Stanislavski
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.
Salman Rushdie
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.
Dorothy Parker
[ Telegram to Mary Sherwood, who finally had her baby after a much-ballyhooed pregnancy, 1915 :]
Anaïs Nin
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that every thing that is born of her is planted in her.
Wilson Mizner
Wilson Mizner . . . recalls his embarrassment when he first came into the world, and found a woman in bed with him.
Groucho Marx
[ J. Cheever Loophole, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.
William James
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Quentin Crisp
You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.