Still Born Child Quotes & Sayings

Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. If you are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents' 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents. — Owen Jones

The length of history spanned by father and daughter is hard to comprehend. W. A. Clark was born in 1839, during the administration of the eighth president of the United States, Martin Van Buren. W.A. was twenty-two when the Civil War began. When Huguette was born in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president, was in the White House. Yet 170 years after W.A.'s birth, his youngest child was still alive at age 103 during the time of the forty-fourth president, Barack Obama. — Bill Dedman

You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small."
"Then what?" I ask.
"Well, then you'll have to find a larger shell to live in."
I consider this for a moment. "What if it's too small but you still want to live there?"
She sighs. "Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you'll either have to be brave and find a new home or you'll have to live inside a broken shell. — Christina Baker Kline

I've thought that perhaps that's why women are so often sad, once the child's born," she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. "Ye think of them while ye talk, and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way you think they are. And then they're born, and they're different - not the way ye thought of them inside, at all. And ye love them, o' course, and get to know them they way they are ... but still, there's the thought of the child ye once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it's the grievin' for the child unborn that ye feel, even as ye hold the born one in your arms. — Diana Gabaldon

When my second child was born, I gave up acting - two young children out on the road was too difficult to manage. I'd always written, but began to do so with real commitment now that it was my only creative outlet. I used all my acting techniques to do it. I still do. — Jenny Downham

When he had shown me all he led me to his door. "Why do you collect such things?" I asked hime before I ventured out upon the Strand.
"When a child is born, he looks first only to his mother. As he grows he learns he has an entire household around him, filled with servants and sweets. Still later he ventures into the streets, and hears the ragman cry, or sees the cocks fight. He learns his letters, his Latin, his arithmetic. Always he is looking beyond himself, and learning. But one day, if he is like most men, he stops. He thinks he has learned all."

He smiled at me.

"I did not choose to stop, that is all. — Katherine Sturtevant

Long time a child, and still a child, when years Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I; For yet I lived like one not born to die; A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears - No hope I needed, and I knew no fears. But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep - and waking, I waked to sleep no more; at once o'ertaking The vanguard of my age, with all arrears Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man, Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is gray, For I have lost the race I never ran. A rathe December blights my lagging May: And still I am a child, though I be old Time is my debtor for my days untold. — Hartley Coleridge

The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born. — George MacDonald

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

Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway so soon after they are born - and yet in each child, every one, has all the potentiality, has it still, and completely, to leap from his low half-animal state to true humanity. Each one of them with this potential, and yet so few can be reached, to make the leap. — Doris Lessing

Bran knew. "She's a child. A child of the forest." He shivered, as much from wonderment as cold. They had fallen into one of Old Nan's tales.
"The First Men named us children," the little woman said. "The giants called us wok dak nag gran, the squirrel people, because we were small and quick and fond of trees, but we are no squirrels, no children. Our name in the True Tongue means those who sing the song of the earth. Before your Old Tongue was ever spoken, we had sun our songs ten thousand years."
Meera said, "You speak the Common Tongue now."
"For him. The Bran boy. I was born in the time of the dragon, and for two hundred years I walked the world of men, to watch and listen and learn. I might be walking still, but my legs were sore and my heart was weary, so I turned my feet for home."
"Two hundred years?" said Meera.
The child smiled. "Men, they are the children. — George R R Martin

When a child is born, it's born with a heart of gold, but the way of this world can turn that heart cold. I'm still a good person, and I thank God for that - He's working with me on it. — Tracy Morgan

And between them, the little shoe-box glistening with scarlet wallpaper and gilt like a fairy coffin. Inside it, there was the crabbed corpse of a still-born child wreathed in bloody newspaper.

"I hated you so much," she said softly. — James Reaney

I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women ... women tend to eat less ... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing ... — Ursula K. Le Guin

I realized today that a daughter is born twice. For nine months, a mother carries and nourishes her daughter in her stomach, then gives birth to her. It's a happy occasion, but the mother is left feeling sadly empty inside ... But I realized today that, after raising her within my love and embrace and sending her off in marriage, this day is just as sad and leaves me just as empty as the one when I first gave birth to her.
Picture Man: Only after a parent has let go of their child will the parent truly be an adult. Living creatures leave their nest when ready. But the ones sending them off still anxiously and unnecessarily spread out their hands to catch them. — Kim Dong Hwa

It makes me really sad that women have been ejected from the seat of their power in this society in terms of what happens around childbirth. In other parts of the world, there are places where women can't drive a car, but they're still in charge of childbirth ... The minute my child was born, I was reborn as a feminist. It's so incredible what women do. I find it metaphorically resonant that a pregnant woman looks like she's just sitting on a couch, but she's actually exhausting herself constructing a human being. The laborious process of growing a human is analogous to how 'women's work' is seen. — Ani DiFranco

What we cannot have, as I've said, is half a jungle. We can't have the world in which men and women love one another and raise healthy families, with almost all children born within wedlock and almost all children living with both parents, and their children in turn visiting their still-married grandparents, if at the same time we welcome the rest of the chaos. You can't have a child-friendly and marriage-friendly street with a porn shop and a strip club on it. The principle that the sexual "fulfillment" of adults is trumps must bear fruit accordingly. It is too wild a thing to nip here and there. It has to be uprooted. It is unworthy of a civilized and self-governing people. — Anthony Esolen

Here was an unknown quantity-a child in breeches with a blue scarf wound around his neck whose job it was to get them out and back alive. This ... was the greatest terror of war: what you didn't know of the men who told you what to do-where to go and when. What if they were mad-or stupid? What if their fear was greater than yours? Or what if they were brave and crazy-wanting and demanding bravery from you? He looked away. He thought of being born-and trusting your parents. Maybe that was the same. Your parents could be crazy too. Or stupid. Still-he'd rather his father was with him-telling him what to do. Then he smiled. He knew that his father would take one look at the crater and tell him not to go. — Timothy Findley

Those who are alone, under hardship or who are ill may find it hard to grasp the Christmas spirit. Thankfully, the miracle of the Christ child born in Bethlehem is what still gives genuine hope to all those who are hurting today. — Dan Davidson

I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy. — Czeslaw Milosz

But what was tragic about the girl was that she had not been born ugly. She might even have been a pretty child, and the grace proper to her age was still at odds with the repulsive premature aging induced by loose living and poverty. A trace of beauty still lingered in the sixteen-year-old face, like pale sunlight fading beneath the massed clouds of a winter's dawn. — Victor Hugo

Each new child that's born to the Antrobuses seems to them to be sufficient reason for the whole universe's being set in motion; and each new child that dies seems to them to have been spared a whole world of sorrow, and what the end of it will be is still very much an open question. — Thornton Wilder

Years later, I read that someone had found genetic components to good motherhood. The Mest and the Peg3 genes occur on chromosome 19, and, ironically, they only work if they're inherited from the father. Imprinting like this usually occurs in evolution because of a genetic battle of the sexes; it's in the best interests of the female to have more litters, but it's in the best interests of the male to protect the child that's already been born. The jury is still out on these — Jodi Picoult

Dear Mommy
I'm doing really good,
I get all A's in school
And I don't cry at bedtime anymore,
Though my new mom said I could.
I remember how much you hate tears,
You slapped them out of me
To make me strong,
I think it worked.
I learned to use a microscope
And my hair grew two inches.
It's pretty, just like yours.
I'm not allowed to clean the house,
Only my own room,
Isn't that a funny rule?
You say kids are so much trouble
Getting born, they better pay it back.
I'm not supposed to take care
Of the other kids, only me, I sort of like it.
I still get the hole in my stomach
When I do something wrong,
I have a saying on my mirror
"Kids make mistakes, It's OK,"
I read it every day,
Sometimes I even believe it.
I wonder if you ever think of me
Or if you're glad the troublemaker's gone,
I never want to see you again.
I love you, Mommy. — Karyl McBride

I overheard things in the Woolworths when I was a child, people saying, 'Oh, poor, little thing,' as if they had some understanding that I was being born biracial into a world that was still very difficult for interracial marriages and biracial children. — Natasha Trethewey

For in the latter days of that passionate life that lay now so far behind him, the conception of a free and equal manhood had become a very real thing to him. He had hoped, as indeed his age had hoped, rashly taking it for granted, that the sacrifice of the many to the few would some day cease, that a day was near when every child born of woman should have a fair and assured chance of happiness. And here, after two hundred years, the same hope, still unfulfilled, cried passionately through the city. After two hundred years, he knew, greater than ever, grown with the city to gigantic proportions, were poverty and helpless labour and all the sorrows of his time. — H.G.Wells

I found him. It was easy. The Church always seems to know where its priests are, even when they're traveling. He remembered me. His hair had turned almost all gray, but he still had his kindly, hesitant manner. "I told him the truth, exactly what had happened. "'The child was conceived out of wedlock,' he said, 'but the child's father was supposed to have been killed in the war. If you marry the mother now, you can adopt him. Then we will "discover" that he is not merely your adopted son, but your natural born son. So, he was your son, he is your son, he will be your son, you will have married his mother, you will have returned from the dead,' he said, counting on his fingers. 'What more can you want? Five out of six. I have no more fingers on this hand.' "'I don't want him to suffer illegitimacy,' I said. "'He won't'. "'Why?' "'I'll take care of it.' "'How?' "'I don't know, but I will.' "And he did. — Mark Helprin

The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is. — Robert M. Pirsig

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer. — Ma Jian

My son is an inspired child, a very positive and happy child. The year he was born, he travelled 13 countries with us. I still remember he was so well behaved that the flight attendants used to thank him! — Sonu Nigam

Christmas was a miserable time for a Jewish child in those days, and I still recall the feeling ... Decades later, I still feel left out at Christmas, but I sing the carols anyway. You might recognize me if you ever heard me. I'm the one who sings, 'La-la, the la-la is born. — Faye Moskowitz

We had traveled far and long to get here but were still the same still-born, unreconstructed people who had once met on this landscape that began somewhere not too far south of the south and ended all the way up in the northernmost extremes of the north, and every soul begotten upon this land was a bastard child of that interminable human equation: colonizer and colony, slave and master, rapist and victim, and any pledge to loyalty and patriotism was an oath to both parts of this equation - we were the seconds obliviously turned up on the old, unregenerate battlefield, here to fight in history's redundant, never-ending duel, always carrying someone else's sword and flag in the name of the myth. — John M. Keller

The present moment is the still point around which the universe arises and subsides, only to be reborn again, fresh as a new born child. — Deepak Chopra