Quotes & Sayings About Newly Born

Nothing, until the ground comes up to meet you, and you land in a jumble of pain and shattered bones; and the scream you didn't think you had in you scrapes your throat raw as you let it out - like the first, shocked breath of a baby newly born into a universe of suffering. — Aliette De Bodard

Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now,
that they are free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,
with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd,
Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish,
even unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell. — Thomas Pynchon

The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up, then hands you to your father, who gently tickles the stomach where the cancer will one day form, studies the eyes where melanoma's dark signature is already written along the optic nerve, touches the back where the liver will one day house the cirrhosis, feels the bloodstream that will sweeten itself into diabetes, admires the shape of the head where the brain will fall to the ax-handle of stroke, or listens to your heart, which, exhausted by the fearful ways and humiliations and indecencies of life, will explode in your chest like a light going out in the world. — Pat Conroy

He'd planned on finding a miracle, and he'd found one. There were many other joys in store for him today in this newly born world... — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have no time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostrate, without a thought, a we that is void of content. — Marcel Proust

Veal! Trust these bloated plutocrats to eat the flesh of poor, newly-born calves! — Sally Wentworth

If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die. — Kenneth L. Patton

So young and so lethargic! As though he had been born to sit and stare like this. Ever since Kiyoaki had confided in him, Shigekuni, who would have been bright and confident, as befitted such an able young man, had undergone a change. Or rather, the friendship between him and Kiyoaki had undergone a strange reversal. For years, each of them had been extremely careful to intrude in no way on the personal life of the other. But now, just three days before, Kiyoaki had suddenly come to him and, like a newly cured patient transmitting his disease to someone else, had passed on to his friend the virus of introspection. It had taken hold so readily that Honda's disposition now seemed a far better host to it than Kiyoaki's. The first major symptom of the disease was a vague sense of apprehension. — Yukio Mishima

The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. — Mervyn Peake

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us. — Frantz Fanon

Mabel was no longer sure of the child's age. She seemed both newly born and as old as the mountains, her eyes animated with unspoken thoughts, her face impassive. Here with the child in the trees, all things seemed possible and true. — Eowyn Ivey

Of those who have commanded battalions and squadrons, only the names remain. The human race has nothing to show for a hundred battles that have been waged. But the great men I speak to you about have prepared pure and lasting pleasures for men yet to be born. A canal lock uniting two seas, a painting by Poussin, a beautiful tragedy, a newly discovered truth-these are things a thousand times more precious than all the annals of the court or all the accounts of military campaigns. You know that, with me, great men come first and heroes last.

I call great men all those who have excelled in creating what is useful or agreeable. The plunderers of the provinces are merely heroes. — Voltaire

Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination or selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race. — Ernst Haeckel

In the newly sighted, learning to see demands a radical change in neurological functioning and, with it, a radical change in psychological functioning, in self, in identity. The change may be experienced in literally life-and-death terms. Valvo quotes a patient of his as saying, 'One must die as a sighted person to be bom again as a blind person,' and the opposite is equally true: one must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing person. — Oliver Sacks

He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another. — Hermann Hesse

It's a tradition my great-grandfather started almost a hundred years ago, after my father was born. He gave my father fifty newly minted silver dollars and explained that each time something really amazing happened to him, he had to return one of the dollars to the universe so that someone else could wish on it.
I smile, recalling how Patrick had once told me a story of his grandfather standing on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1936 and throwing a silver dollar into the water after his beloved Yankees won the World Series. They won it for the next three years too, and his grandfather always believed that it was his coins - good luck returned to the universe - that kept their streak alive ...
... My father always used to tell me that if you keep the coins, you throw things out of balance ... It's all about passing the luck on and thanking the world for whatever good things have happened to you. — Kristin Harmel

A heart given freely is the most vulnerable and selfless thing one can offer another human being. It can be as fragile and needy as a newly born infant, or as solid and self-supporting as a granite pillar, yet it is the hands of the recipient that determines its ultimate fate. — Mark W. Boyer

I only have two rules for my newly born daughter: she will dress well and never have sex. — John Malkovich

Dressed to Live

Today is my newest garment.

Let me put it on
with ceremony.
Let me step into the day
as if to bathe in the passing hours.
Let me tuck in the loose ends
with precision.

Today is my newest garment.

Let me wear it as if it holds
my head high,
as if it can carry me
on its shoulders,
as if it will protect me
from the howl.

Today is my newest garment.

Let me fill my pockets.
Let them bulge with riches:
light on the wide sidewalk,
kind words from a stranger,
things perched, newly born,
carefully placed, aging gracefully.

Today is my newest garment.

At night
let me disrobe
grateful and whole,
knowing that
tomorrow
I will dress again. — Nancy Boutilier

There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth's passions, earth's griefs, earth's incongruous, ridiculous humours - dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face. — Mervyn Peake

Rome the crucible, but also the furnace, the boiling metal, the hammer, and the anvil as well, visible proof of the changes and repetitions of history, one place in the world where man will have most passionately lived. The great fire of Troy from which a fugitive had escaped, taking with him his aged father, his young son, and his household goods, had passed down to us that night in this flaming festival. I thought also, with something like awe, of conflagrations to come. These millions of lives past, present, and future, these structures newly arisen from ancient edifices and followed themselves by structures yet to be born, seemed to me to succeed each other in time like waves; by chance it was at my feet that night in this flaming festival. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear. — Markus Zusak

A sick person is Allah's guest for as long as he is ill. Every day he is sick, God gives him countless rewards, as long as he says ' al hamdulillah', praise be
to God, and does not fight it and complain. When God returns to him his health, he expiates his sins and gives him the status of the newly-born
(completely pure and free of any sin). Illness is a mercy and a blessing. — Kristiane Backer

Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

With all its imperfections lying heavy on its head, I can't help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting perhaps, but nevertheless my very own. This is an experience no artist ever forgets - the birth cry of a newly born baby of letters, the genuine article. — Lawrence Durrell

The "sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine," was hardly known to him, or to the generality of people, by name. — Charles Dickens

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art. — William Wordsworth

The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind. — Johannes Kepler

The real payoff of a yoga practice, I came to see, is not a perfect handstand or a deeper forward bend - it is the newly born self that each day steps off the yoga mat and back into life. — Rolf Gates

I always knew I'd be a sailor. In my cradle, playing with my toes, I knew it. What else could there have been? The sailors had made my blood move before I was born, I now believe. As my mother stood one night upon the shit-smelling Bermondsey shore with me in her belly, the sailors had sung out there across the great river, and their siren song had come to the shell-pink enormity that was my listening ear newly formed in the amniotic fluid.
Or so I believe. — Carol Birch

Easy thing for a spirit to get used to. It is very confining, very limiting. So the child will cry out at suddenly being so limited. Hear this cry. Understand it. And give your children as much of a sense of "unlimitedness" as you possibly can. Next, introduce them to the world you have created with gentleness and care. Be full of care - that is to say, be careful - of what you put into their memory storage units. Children remember everything they see, everything they experience. Why do you spank your children the moment they exit the womb? Do you really imagine this is the only way to get their engines going? Why do you take your babies away from their mothers minutes after they have been separated from the only life-form they have known in all of their present existence? Will not the measuring and the weighing and the prodding and the poking wait for just a moment while the newly born experience the safety and the comfort of that which — Neale Donald Walsch

Nothing's scarier than having a sick child, and one so newly born, and so vulnerable. It's the worst thing for a parent. — Kenneth Oppel

It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child. — Maria Montessori

The Holy Night We sate among the stalls at Bethlehem; The dumb kine from their fodder turning them, Softened their horned faces To almost human gazes Toward the newly Born: The simple shepherds from the star-lit brooks Brought visionary looks, As yet in their astonied hearing rung The strange sweet angel-tongue: The magi of the East, in sandals worn, Knelt reverent, sweeping round, With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground, The incense, myrrh, and gold These baby hands were impotent to hold: So let all earthlies and celestials wait Upon thy royal state. Sleep, sleep, my kingly One! — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A newly born genre never supplants or replaces any already existing genres. Each new genre merely supplements the old ones, merely widens the circle of already existing genres. For every genre has its own predominant sphere of existence, in which it is irreplaceable. Thus the appearance of the polyphonic novel does not nullify or in any way restrict the further productive development of monologic forms of the novel (biographical, historical, the novel of everyday life, the novel-epic, etc.), for there will always continue to exist and expand those spheres of existence, of man and nature, which require precisely objectified and finalizing, that is monological, forms of artistic cognition. But again we repeat: the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere in which this consciousness exists, in all its depth and specificity, cannot be reached through a monologic artistic approach. — Mikhail Bakhtin

I've learned ... That when your newly born grandchild holds your little finger in his little fist, that you're hooked for life. — Andy Rooney

They had left the demigod they now called the Voice in a government creche in orbit. The Archipelago had facilities for newly born artificial sentients - a revelation that still astonished and unsettled Marya when she thought about it. The Voice had gone willingly into the maw of the jewellike orbiting structure; as the doors closed she had looked back, but Marya could read nothing in her gaze - neither hope nor fear. — Karl Schroeder