Birth

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

 

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.

 

I think I was cold in the womb.

 

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Some men are born posthumously.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: