Midwife Quotes & Sayings

And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone. — Caitlin Moran

Brasi left the room. Two of his men assisted the midwife and the baby was born, the mother was exhausted and went into a deep sleep. Brasi was summoned and Filomena, who had wrapped the newborn child in an extra blanket, extended the bundle to him and said, "If you're the father, take her. My work is finished." Brasi glared at her, malevolent, insanity stamped on his face. "Yes, I'm the father," he said. "But I don't want any of that race to live. Take it down to the basement and throw it into the furnace. — Mario Puzo

Workers of lungless labs- when dying
Will you be proud you were midwife
To implements exemplifying
Assaults against the heart of life?
You knew their purpose, yet you made them.
If you had scruples, you betrayed them.
What pastoral response acquits
Those who made ovens for Auschwitz?
Indeed it is said that the banality
Of evil is its greatest shock.
It jokes. It punches its time clock,
Plays with its kids. The triviality
Of slaughtering millions can't impinge
Upon its peace, or make it cringe. — Vikram Seth

It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians simply on the grounds that obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor. — Ina May Gaskin

When a woman births, not only is a baby being born but so is a mother.
How we treat her will affect how she feels about herself as a mother
and as a parent.
Be gentle. Be kind. Listen. — Ruth Ehrhardt

One of the obvious implications is that a person will have to face the fact that she cannot meet other people's expectations. This signals the end of what might be called the "camel" phase of human development. I believe it was Nietschze who suggested that for the first part of life, we are camels, trudging through the desert, accepting on our backs everybody's "shoulds" and "don'ts." Camels only know how to spit; they don't think for themselves or talk back. As the camel dies, a lion is born in its place. Lions discover both their roar and the art of preening. The lion may be a little shaky at first, so support and encouragement are vital. But once the camel begins to die (e.g., signaled by depression), there is no turning back. Symptoms occupy the space between the death of the camel and the birth of the lion. A therapist can be a good midwife during this liminal phase. — Stephen Gilligan

O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you ...
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomi
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep. — William Shakespeare

I love 'Call the Midwife'; it's an absolute gem of a programme. Filming the Christmas special and then the second series felt like going back to a boarding school that you really love and is full of friends. — Helen George

I was born in Tyrone, 1956, for something I didn't do. I was innocent. But they gave me life. I still remember the midwife who extradited me. — Kevin McAleer

As I told you, I'm not the settlement midwife. I've not birthed one baby." "But you are an herbalist." "I suppose I am. The woods and Ma Horn have been my teachers since I was a girl." She looked away from him, embarrassed. Here she was, considering him a quack, and he was unraveling her own lack of expertise fast as a spool of thread. "I'm finding the settlers here a superstitious lot. I dinna doubt you are much the same." She sat up straighter. "What do you mean?" "Axes under the bed tae cut the pain of childbirth. Garlic charms and spells. Boiling beaver tails tae cure snakebite. No' tae mention the misuse of useful herbs." Her own face clouded. "I do none of those things." He looked doubtful. "Prove it." "How do you expect me to do that?" His steely eyes held a challenge. "Work alongside me. — Laura Frantz

A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself. — Terry Teachout

People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don't reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse 'pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, on spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and mother mouth screaming. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done seen. I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her. — Marlon James

Anna and I did not make love. I don't remember why. Maybe we didn't need to. She might have been afraid, although I doubt she was afraid of much. She'd been a midwife before she opened a studio; she'd held life in her hands, like a wire from a galvanic cell. Maybe death was too strong in me for an act so inspirited with life. Although I sometimes think that death is what gives lovemaking its desperate and terrible joy. — Norman Lock

Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored. — Deborah Harkness

Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns. — David Ogilvy

Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain,
Your flowers feed on carrion
so do your birds;
Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap,
Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding.
No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny,
Life spurts from you, little world,
and you regard it with disdain.
Only bruised men sense your cruelty,
men whose life has lost its meaning. — James Kavanaugh

Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath. — Ram Dass

I still deliver like a midwife — Drake

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined. — George Saunders

The sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth. — Dervla Murphy

Pain is God's midwife, that helps some virtue into existence. — Henry Ward Beecher

My midwife partners and I at the The Farm learned by observation and experience that the presence of even one person who is not exquisitely attuned to the mother's feelings can stop some women's labors. All women are sensitive. Some women are extraordinarily so. We learned this truth by observing many labors stop or slow down when someone entered the birth room who was not intimate with the laboring mother's feelings. If that person then left the room, labor usually returned to its former pace or intensity. — Ina May Gaskin

Interrogation is largely a process of rebirth done in the clumsiest fashion possible, a system in which the midwife attempts to deliver the same baby a dozen times in a dozen different ways. — Martin Cruz Smith

Country music has been empowering to women. Women invented it - it was women singing to their children that built country music. The people making country music today might not even know that it all started with a midwife. But it's true, it really did. That's where Michael learned to shake it the way he did. It wasn't from old Papa Jackson, I'll tell you that. — Ketch Secor

We should work to guarantee that there is a midwife or health worker by every woman's side during childbirth. — Liya Kebede

Katherine the Midwife — Darynda Jones

In the valleys where I was born they say it is God's sword, dropped from the heavens.'
'Don't you?' asked Flood.
Whirrun rubbed some dirt from the crosspiece with his thumb. 'I used too.'
'Now?'
'God makes things, no? God is a farmer. A craftsman. A midwife. God gives things life.' He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky. 'What would God want with a sword? — Joe Abercrombie

After about five hours of pushing, my midwife and my birthing assistant said, 'You know, we have a few suggestions.' And I was like, 'Really? After five hours of pushing you have a few suggestions? You couldn't have told me five minutes in?' — Evangeline Lilly

The greatest privilege of a human life is to become a
midwife to the awakening of the Soul in another person. — Plato

One person seeks a midwife for his thoughts; the other, someone he can assist. Here is the origin of a good conversation. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm in training to become a midwife. I'm almost there and before I know it I'll be able to open my own practice, if that's what I desire. — Erykah Badu

Prayer is the midwife of mercy, that helps to bring it forth. — Matthew Henry

The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body shook and for a long time prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees by her bed. He held his wife's hand to his lips and kissed it, and her hand responded to his kisses with weak movement of finger. Meanwhile, at the foot of the bed, in the midwife's expert hands, like the flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being who had never existed before ... — Leo Tolstoy

I have always appreciated vintage clothing, but after working on 'Call the Midwife' for six months, I love moving away from vintage in my day-to-day wear. — Jessica Raine

Fear not, the time is coming
Fear not, your bones are strong
Fear not, help is nearby
Fear not, Gula is near
Fear not, the baby is at the door
Fear not, he will live to bring you honor
Fear not, the hands of the midwife are clever
Fear not, the earth is beneath you
Fear not, we have water and salt
Fear not, little mother
Fear not, mother of us all — Anita Diamant

Alyce," she breathed. Alyce sounded clean and smart. You could love someone maned Alyce. She looked back at the face in the water. "This is me, Alyce." It was right. So the newly called Alyce shifted the pack on her shoulders, and with her head back and bare feet solid on the ground, she headed back to the midwife's cottage and never noticed when it grew dark, for heat and light were within her. — Karen Cushman

As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell's unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours' living room. — J.G. Ballard

Music! Goddammit! Music!" Mom screamed.
"We have some lovely Enya. Very soothing," the midwife said.
"Fuck Enya!" Mom screamed. — Gayle Forman

I was not the midwife of the Law School, but its fraternal twin. — Norman Lamm

A good talker is sensitive to expression, to tone and color and inflection in human speech. Because he himself is articulate, he can help others to articulate their half-formulated feelings. His mind fills in the gaps, and he becomes, in Socrates' words, a kind of midwife for ideas that are struggling to be born. — Sydney J. Harris

In all cultures, the midwife's place is on the threshold of life, where intense human emotions, fear, hope, longing, triumph, and incredible physical power-enable a new human being to emerge. Her vocation is unique. — Sheila Kitzinger

[referencing African girls with no medical care while giving birth and the devastating fistulas they are left with untreated] Instead of receiving treatment, these young girls--often just girls of fifteen or sixteen--typically find their lives effectively over. They are divorced from their husbands and, because they emit a terrible odor from their wastes, are often forced to live in a hut by themselves on the edge of the village. Eventually, they starve to death or die of an infection that progresses along the birth canal. The fistula patient is the modern-day leper," notes Ruth Kennedy, a British nurse-midwife. — Nicholas D. Kristof

DON'T LOOK LIKE a midwife," Brother Gregory interrupted, as he blew on a page to make it dry. His face was averted to conceal his distaste. It is one thing to describe, say, the Virgin with angel attendants, but this woman had no discretion at all. "I'm not one anymore," replied Margaret, looking at him coldly. "That is self-evident; it's not an art practiced by women in respectable circumstances," said Brother Gregory, looking around. "It ought to be the most respected profession in the world - midwives witness how God makes the world new," said Margaret; — Judith Merkle Riley

Antonina woke in the night to help midwife an animal like a giraffe (always tricky because the mother gives birth standing up, the calf falls headfirst, and the mother doesn't want help anyway). This — Diane Ackerman

If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class. — George Orwell

The shell must be broken before the bird can fly. — Jennifer Worth

Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community. — John Taylor Gatto

Paddy was in the delivery room when the midwife handed him a black baby. "Is this yours?" she asked "probably" said Paddy "she burns everything else" — Billy Connolly

Well, I've just played a midwife but never for a second would I think that I could ever deliver a baby! So, to that essence, it's still pretending. But it's worked out ok so far, touch wood, because you're doing so many different things - if you're playing a lawyer or someone medical, you can dip your toe into a lot of different things. — Christine Bottomley

Although he would not remember it, when Lucien was born, the first thing he saw as he peeked over the edge of the world was Madame Lessard's bunghole. Well that can't be right, he thought. And he thought he might cry for the shock. Then the midwife flipped him over and the second thing he saw was the blue sky through the skylight. He thought, Oh, that's better. So he cried for the beauty and was at a total loss for words for almost a year. He wouldn't remember the moment, but the feeling would come back to him from time to time, when he encountered blue. — Christopher Moore

Is there a difference between being the midwife of truth, or the midwife of legends? — Amin Maalouf

The Midwife talked to herself now, rather than God, as she walked the road past the Big Bog, wondering if a child born female could truly live her whole life as a male. And if this were possible and offended no god, then perhaps the world had no order other than what was arbitrarily imposed by humans. — Kate Horsley

Every midwife knows
that not until a mother's womb
softens from the pain of labor
will a way unfold
and the infant find that opening to be born.
Oh friend!
There is treasure in your heart,
it is heavy with child.
Listen.
All the awakened ones,
like trusted midwives are saying,
'welcome this pain.
It opens the dark passage of Grace. — Rumi

I had put a shower curtain on the floor, covered the couches and our new flat-screen TV with garbage bags. The midwife asked, "What do you think is going to happen in here?" I never said I was smart. — Jim Gaffigan

A mathematics teacher is a midwife to ideas. — George Polya

Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born. — Stephen Jenkinson

Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all. — Jennifer Worth

I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear.
Indeed, 'tis true that Henry told me of;
For I have often heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs forward:
Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste,
And seek their ruin that usurp'd our right?
The midwife wonder'd and the women cried
'O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!'
And so I was; which plainly signified
That I should snarl and bite and play the dog.
Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word 'love,' which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone. — William Shakespeare

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. — John Dewey

Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make. — Helen Varney

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war. — Jeane Kirkpatrick

You aren't better than your fellow midwife, and together in numbers you're stronger. — L.A. Casey

$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding. — Frank A. Oski

Madame Lefoux acted as midwife. In her scientific way, she was unexpectedly adept at the job. When the infant finally appeared, she held it up for Alexia to see, rather proudly, as though she'd done all the hard work herself. 'Goodness,' said an exhausted Lady Maccon, 'are babies customarily that repulsive looking? — Gail Carriger

You are a midwife, assisting at someone else's birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge. When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say, "We did it ourselves! — John Heider

We are meant to midwife dreams for one another. Success occurs in clusters — Julia Cameron

She sold her hair; she sold her teeth, but it was never enough. The baby became lethargic and ceased to thrive. She called it "wasting fever".
When the baby died no money could be spared for burial, so she sealed him in an orange box weighed down with stones, and slipped him into the river.
That furtive journey in the middle of the night with her dead baby was the moment when she finally accepted defeat, and knew that the inevitable had come. She and the children would have to go to the workhouse.". — Jennifer Worth

How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife? — Sue Monk Kidd

We are now witnessing, after the slow fermentation of fifty years, a concentration of technical power aimed at the essential determinants of heredity, development and disease. This concentration is made possible by the common function of nucleic acids as the molecular midwife of all reproductive particles. Indeed it is the nucleic acids which, in spite of their chemical obscurity, are giving to biology a unity which has so far been lacking, a chemical unity. — C.D. Darlington

There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation. — Naomi Klein

Which Cromwell was, as the chief engineer of Henry's Reformation. He crushed the Roman church, looted the monasteries and nationalized faith by subordinating clergy to king. That may flatter today's reflexive anticlericalism. But we do well to remember that the centralized state Cromwell helped midwife did prepare the ground, over the coming centuries, — Anonymous

The king as the father or midwife, taking care of children. This made real families less necessary. Everyone was equal with one another and all were citizens of the state. The state protected as many aspects of life as was possible, from the wages of the workers to the welfare of those who could not work. It took the pressure off immediate families to shoulder each other's burdens. The king would take care of them. They would simply ship their aged and infirm off to government communes, so they could get back to maximizing their service for the collective. — Brian Godawa

Hitchcock's debut novel introduces 14-year-old Jessie Pearl, who endures more than her fair share of hardships, beginning with the death of her mother. Opening in 1922, the story follows the daily activities on the family's North Carolina tobacco farm. ...Hitchcock's story is gently and lovingly written, with elements drawn from her own family history. Its detailed honesty about the particular struggles of the period, especially for strong women (Maude, a no-nonsense midwife, is particularly memorable), is significant.
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY — Publishers Weekly

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools ... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife. — H.L. Mencken

alcohol played the midwife — James Branch Cabell

You come to this place, mid-life. You don't know how you got here, but suddenly you're staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn't. When the midwife says, 'It's a boy,' where does the girl go? When you think you're pregnant, and you're not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines. — Hilary Mantel

When she was pregnant with her second child, a midwife asked if Catherine had any unspoken fears about anything that could go wrong with the baby - such as genetic defects or complications during the birth. My sister said, 'My only fear is that he might grow up to become a Republican. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The task of the mediator is to help the parties to open difficult issues and nudge them forward in the peace process. The mediator's role combines those of a ship's pilot, consulting medical doctor, midwife and teacher. — Martti Ahtisaari

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain. — Clifton Fadiman

You wouldn't tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or a underperforming midwife at your child's birth. Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom? — Michael Gove

Giving birth was the most amazing thing I've ever done. I'd been living in a Third World country, and I said, 'I'm going to just squat behind a tree.' I basically did that but in a chair in my living room. I didn't want a sterile hospital room. I didn't want doctors. I had a midwife. — Carolyn Murphy

Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within ... Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason. — Jostein Gaarder

Temporis filia veritas; cui me obstetricari non pudet.
Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife. — Johannes Kepler

The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new Self to be born, hardship is necessary. — Elif Shafak

The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing - Be thou dull; 60
Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk, do anything but write.
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men,
A strong nativity - but for the pen;
Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink, 65
Still thou mayest live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For treason, botched in rhyme, will be thy bane;
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck. — John Dryden

No times were more dangerous than when our country was born, when revolution was our midwife. — Daniel Inouye

My dear boy, in Ireland the midwife uses one hand to hold the baby's best fighting arm from the font water, and grips its jaws with the other lest the goes to litigation about it. Says O'LiamRoe — Dorothy Dunnett

Because 'Call The Midwife' is a gentle drama, not a documentary, it's not appropriate to portray Sister Monica Joan's condition in all its brutal reality. — Judy Parfitt

Nationalism of the Irish type is often regarded as reactionary. With the World Revolution and the Classless Society waiting for the midwife, why take a torch to the stable to assist at the birth of a puppy? Even if the puppy is pedigree. On this question I am unable to make up my mind. — Louis MacNeice

Their devotion showed me there were no versions of love there was only ... Love. That it had no equal and that it was worth searching for, even if that search took a lifetime. — Jennifer Worth

When you are in hard labor, remember that the length of labor is usually proportional to the number of people around. Avoid the presence of anybody who might release adrenaline. The best situation I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody else around than an experienced, motherly and silent midwife who does not behave like a guide or an observer. — Michel Odent

I'd be just as happy being a midwife. That's my ideal job. — Allison Anders

A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him. — Jean Renoir

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on. — A.S. Byatt

Mom was the midwife who delivered stories to me. — Rachael Hanel

Normally, I'm the one fawning over the man, but in 'Call The Midwife,' I'm the experienced woman. — Jessica Raine

There was a woman in Tunisia called Madame Pinot. She was a midwife and had helped in the birth of my siblings and me. I assisted her. I helped women give birth to a lot of babies when I was very young. — Azzedine Alaia

Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the world. — Bunker Roy

The Mean Value Theorem is the midwife of calculus - not very important or glamorous by itself, but often helping to deliver other theorems that are of major significance. — Edward Mills Purcell

Odd that you should choose to be a midwife, having never experienced birth yourself." In other circumstances the words would have stung. She thought, Do not physicians provide medicaments for illnesses they have never suffered? — Roberta Rich