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I came to the place of my birth and cried, The friends of my youth, where are they? And echo answered, Where are they?
-Arabic Proverb
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It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.
-James Augustine
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Birth was the death of him.
-Samuel Beckett
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
-Walter Benjamin
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Luckless is the country in which the symbols of procreation are the objects of shame, while the agents of destruction are honored! And yet you call that member your pudendum, or shameful part, as if there were anything more glorious than creating life, or anything more atrocious than taking it away.
-Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac
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Behold, I was shapened in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. Psalms 51:5
-Bible
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We are brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
-Bible
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My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt; helpless, naked, piping loud, like a fiend hid in a cloud.
-William Blake
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I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.
-Samuel Butler
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What a strange thing is the propagation of life! A bubble of seed which may be spilt in a whore's lap, or in the orgasm of a voluptuous dream, might (for aught we know) have formed a Caesar or a Bonaparte -- there is nothing remarkable recorded of their sires, that I know of.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.
-Deepak Chopra
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Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
-E. M. Cioran
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Feeling fat lasts nine months but the joy of becoming a mom lasts forever.
-Nikki Dalton
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Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor --because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.
-Angela Y. Davis
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Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it's the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband's mood.
-Marquis De Sade
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
-Annie Dillard
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Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
-Andrea Dworkin
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We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity.... But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.
-Meister Eckhart
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If men were equally at risk from this condition -- if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains -- then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.
-Barbara Ehrenreich
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These wretched babies don't come until they are ready.
-Queen Elizabeth
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Abortion is a skillfully marketed product sold to women at a crisis time in their life. If the product is defective, she can't return it for a refund.
-Carol Evertt
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It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.
-Sigmund Freud
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The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
-Sigmund Freud
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What is this talked-of mystery of birth but being mounted bareback on the earth?
-Robert Frost
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Books about Birth
