Birth Stories Quotes & Sayings

At the end of a criminal's life, it's always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left.
I've heard Grandad's war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell.
Birth to grave, we know it'll be us one day. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first. — Holly Black

I was born at six months, and I weighed 900 grams [less than two pounds]. I have a very heroic birth story. — Etgar Keret

Wine is a story that gives birth to stories, and man, a story-telling animal. — Neel Burton

Every morning
before the birds start
trilling me their stories,
I give birth to a new love
through my same old heart
when a lake's placidity
finds life in the swans breath
Only for you...

From the poem 'Only For You — Munia Khan

I think that fact alone levels everything. Slapstick amazes me, the folly of humans today, the Ponzi schemes, giving birth to eight babies at once, it's amazing ... And I know, it's horrible to have your money stolen and all that, but those are amazing stories. — Laurel Nakadate

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. — Richard Dawkins

Myths are stories for our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are. — Joseph Campbell

The inimitable stories of Tong-King never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, and the two characters are both of noble birth. — Ernest Bramah

Take away the stories of Jesus's birth, and all you lose is four chapters of the Gospels. Take away the resurrection and you lose the entire New Testament, and most of the second-century fathers as well. — N. T. Wright

I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to you. — Kelly J. Cogswell

What I want people to realize is that "transitioning" is not the end of the journey. Yes, it's an integral part of revealing who we are to ourselves and the world, but there's much life afterward. These stories earn us visibility but fail at reporting on what our lives are like beyond our bodies, hormones, surgeries, birth names, and before-and-after photos. — Janet Mock

You are born with a character; it is given, a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth ... Each person enters the world called. — James Hillman

Stories teach us in ways we can remember. They teach us that each woman responds to birth in her unique way and how very wide-ranging that way can be. Sometimes they teach us about silly practices once widely held that were finally discarded. They teach us the occasional difference between accepted medical knowledge and the real bodily experiences that women have - including those that are never reported in medical textbooks nor admitted as possibilities in the medical world. They also demonstrate the mind/body connection in a way that medical studies cannot. Birth stories told by women who were active participants in giving birth often express a good deal of practical wisdom, inspiration, and information for other women. Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman's true capacities in pregnancy and birth. — Ina May Gaskin

Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop. — Questlove

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale. — Harold Brodkey

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another. — Marcus Sedgwick

Finn is just a stormtrooper, and stormtroopers are no longer clones, so they are bred from birth to fight. He's not too sure about it, so he escapes and meets Rey and Poe and BB8, and their stories kind of mesh together, and they go on a major adventure. — John Boyega

Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog. — Philip Yancey

Portraits of Integrity is sure to be a favorite with your family! It contains 45 stories of real people from history who, in the course of their lives, have been placed in situations where their character shone through. History is best remembered when learned through the stories of those who lived it! For many years, I have given to parents a list of 45 character qualities with Scripture verses to learn what God's Word says about each one. Principles are best learned from practical examples and that is what has given birth to this book. Through the lives of people, some of whom you have heard of and some you will be meeting for the first time, you will learn how to appreciate character in the lives of others and be inspired to become people of character yourselves. I hope you will be challenged as I have to learn of people who, often at great sacrifice, strove to fulfill their responsibilities in life and as a result left to us a legacy of character! — Marilyn Boyer

I remember the strength of her body writhing inside the velvet. And, suddenly, the velvet was gone as though my greedy hands had worn it away and she stood flushed and trembling before me. I forgave every complaint I had leveled against God at the sight of her tremulous beauty - wisps of curls like trickles of burgundy trailing over breasts as plump and round as a pair of bandy hens fattened up for Sunday dinner. I could scarcely touch her. My fingertips traveled over her roundness. In rashness I gathered her to me, pressed against her ... lay her down. I was inside her before her back touched the sheets. Her sighs could give birth to new stars. — Kathleen Valentine

In his book Human Universals, Donald E. Brown lists traits that people in all places share. The list goes on and on. All children fear strangers and prefer sugar solutions to plain water from birth. All humans enjoy stories, myths, and proverbs. In all societies men engage in more group violence and travel farther from home than women. In all societies, husbands are on average older than their wives. People everywhere rank one another according to prestige. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness. — David Brooks

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. — Richard Dawkins

The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth
the very thing the whole story has been about. — C.S. Lewis

Lewis had said that there is no creativity de novo in us - that we are all sub-creators pirating and rearranging portions of reality. I agreed. But it was only an idea. And then it took on flesh. I began to see the world more like a cook than a writer. There were boundless ingredients out there, combinations waiting to be discovered and simmered and served. There were truths and stories and characters and quirks that could clash badly, and some that could marry and birth sequels. I began to feel a lot more comfortable. It wasn't all on me to create. It was on me to find. To catch. To arrange. — N.D. Wilson

In any case, this is how all our stories begin, in darkness with our eyes closed, and all our stories end the same way, too, with all of us uttering some last words - or perhaps someone else's - before slipping back into darkness as our series of unfortunate events comes to an end. — Lemony Snicket

You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case "head drive" that starts the corruption of the files. — Nikki Sixx

I have come to the conclusion that a goodly number of the fables that pass under the name of the Samian slave, Aesop, were derived from India, probably from the same source whence the same tales were utilised in the Jatakas, or Birth-stories of Buddha. — Joseph Jacobs

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on. I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board. I think the equivalent of balance is tone, so I think tone gives birth to the story. — Etgar Keret

Most people never think beyond their birth. But if I had contented myself with everyone else's opinions of me, I wouldn't be the man I am today. People like us make our own destinies, Gwenwhyfar - and to the waves with the naysayers who oppose us. — Jennifer McKeithen

Donald Saari uses a combination of stories and questions to challenge students to think critically about calculus. "When I finish this process," he explained, "I want the students to feel like they have invented calculus and that only some accident of birth kept them from beating Newton to the punch." In essence, he provokes them into inventing ways to find the area under the curve, breaking the process into the smallest concepts (not steps) and raising the questions that will Socratically pull them through the most difficult moments. Unlike so many in his discipline, he does not simply perform calculus in front of the students; rather, he raises the questions that will help them reason through the process, to see the nature of the questions and to think about how to answer them. "I want my students to construct their own understanding," he explains, "so they can tell a story about how to solve the problem. — Ken Bain

I am not the sort of person about whom stories are told. Those of humble birth suffer their heartbreaks and celebrate their triumphs unnoticed by the bards, leaving no trave in the fables of their time. — Elizabeth Blackwell

And we will shade
Ourselves whole summers by a river glade;
And I will tell thee stories of the sky,
And breathe thee whispers of its minstrelsy,
My happy love will overwing all bounds!
O let me melt into thee! let the sounds
Of our close voices marry at their birth;
Let us entwine hoveringly! — John Keats

With Pauline at my side, in one swift act that could never be undone, an act that ended a thousand dreams but gave birth to one, I bolted for the cover of the forest and never looked back. Lest we repeat history, the stories shall be passed from father to son, from mother to daughter, for with but one generation, history and truth are lost forever. - Morrighan Book of Holy Text, Vol. III — Mary E. Pearson

I'm not his man, Father. I'm Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and the lords of Bebbanburg don't marry pious maggotfaced bitches of low birth. — Bernard Cornwell

God's gift of a call to be Christ's ambassadors of reconciliation intends to unseat other lords - power, nationalism, race or ethnic loyalty as an end in itself - and give birth to deeper allegiances, stories, spaces and communities that are a "demonstration plot" of the reality of God's new creation in Christ. Put simply, reconciliation both names the church as and requires the church to be the sign and agent of God's reconciliation. — Emmanuel Katongole

Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in the body, in the woods, in the water, in the soil. We find it in music, dance, and sometimes in poetry. We find it in a baby's face, and in the adult's face behind the mask. We find it in each other's eyes, when we look. We find it in an embrace, which is, when we feel into it, being to being, an incredibly intimate act. We find it in laughter and sobs, and we find it in the voice behind the spoken word. We find it in fairy tales and myths, and the tales we tell, even if fictional. Sometimes embroidering a tale enlarges it as a vehicle for the truth. We find it in silence and stillness. We find it in pain and loss. We find it in birth and death. — Charles Eisenstein

I once held a belief that life made sense, that working toward a dream would birth substance. Nothing else mattered. I soon discovered that success is as long-lasting as any of life's novelties.
We've all been happy with new things, only to be disappointed later. Dolls and soldiers our parents toiled to give us found their way to pedestals, then to the back of closets.
I'd always dreamed of marrying a woman I loved and watching my children grow. I wonder if our lives should be filled with the pursuit of such dreams, those magical hopes interwoven into our story. Our stories are decorative shells for the crabs we really are, both protecting and exposing us to the manic outside. — Christopher Hawke

If you knew everyone's story, you would love them. You can't really hate anyone if you know everything that happened to them between their birth and now; why they became the way they became; why they have walls up or down. If you truly know someone, you'd get it. — Emma Stone

There are stories about technology. There are stories about stories. Most of all, though, there are stories that tackle our understanding, or lack thereof, of the many machines that have freed us to love, work, birth, build, change, destroy, and reconfigure reality, often beyond our will or comprehension - even as they greatly augment our will and comprehension. — Jason Heller

My sister, the one who knows everything and pulls out facts out of a bottomless hat, told me people aren't afraid of snakes or water upon birth. It is only once we hear the snake and water stories, she says, once we are exposed to fear, that we deny our primal instincts and make room for the dread to take root and mature. — Tania Aebi

Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife. — Betty Friedan

A similar lack of concern about Jesus's earthly origins can be found in the first gospel, Mark, written just after 70 C.E. Mark's focus is kept squarely on Jesus's ministry; he is uninterested either in Jesus's birth or, perhaps surprisingly, in Jesus's resurrection, as he writes nothing at all about either event. The early Christian community appears not to have been particularly concerned about any aspect of Jesus's life before the launch of his ministry. Stories about his birth and childhood are conspicuously absent from the earliest written documents. The Q material, which was compiled around 50 C.E., makes no mention of anything that happened before Jesus's baptism by John the Baptist. The letters of Paul, which make up the bulk of the New Testament, are wholly detached from any event in Jesus's life save his crucifixion and resurrection (though Paul does mention the Last Supper). — Reza Aslan

Julio's Day is a story of one man's life, but it's a great more than that as well. It's the story of the life of a century, also told as if a day. Beginning with Julio's birth in 1900 and ending with his death in 2000, the graphic novel touches on most of the major events that shaped the 20th century. — Brian Evenson

What I love about stories the most is the power they have to teach us of possibilities that might not occur to us without them. — Ina May Gaskin

Our trials, our troubles, our demons, our angels - we reenact them because these stories explain our lives. Literature's lessons repeat because they echo from deeper places. They touch a chord in our soul because they're notes we've already heard played. Plots repeat because, from the birth of man, they explore the reasons for our being. Stories teach us to not give up hope because there are times in our own journey when we mustn't give up hope. They teach endurance because in our lives we are meant to endure. They carry messages that are older than the words themselves, messages that reach beyond the page. — Camron Wright

I ignored him, concentrating on Lilith. "According to the stories, after you were expelled from Eden you went down into Hell, where you coupled with demons and gave birth to all the monsters that have plagued the world."
"I was young," said Lilith. "You know how it is. We all do things we later regret, when we're being rebellious teenagers. — Simon R. Green

Becky was a weed. Nobody ever wanted them taking over the bigger, prettier plants. People went to all extremes to make them go away. They sprayed poison, pulled until the roots gave way. They felt only like their garden was complete when every tendril was extirpated. This was how she felt from birth. — Ruth McLeod-Kearns