Quotes & Sayings About Stillborn

When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange.
I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else's; surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now - now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn. I want people to know but I don't want to say it aloud. People don't like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card. — Elizabeth McCracken

It happened during the winter of 1973, when evenings rang out stillborn from far across the weathered moorland, and snow fell hard and heavy and clung atop the peppered veins of nature's tough bracken, all picture-postcard like. — Jordan Mason

My reading is dead!' Pilar gasped. The little girl held the fourth grade reading book, rigid as a stillborn, across her open palms as if pleading with the pretty gringa teacher to take the burden away. — Janiece Hopper

A Horrible thought: could this be the pattern of my life ahead? Every ambition thwarted, every dream stillborn? But a seconds reflection tells me that what I'm currently experiencing is shared by all sentient, suffering human beings, except for the very, very few: the genuinely talented - the odd, rare genius - and, of course, the exceptionally lucky swine. — William Boyd

Many discoveries must have been stillborn or smothered at birth. We know only those which survived. — William Ian Beardmore Beveridge

I was born Gaynor Hopkins, one of seven children. My mum, Elsie, and dad, Glyndwr, always said they had seven children, although my sister Paulene was stillborn. — Bonnie Tyler

The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work has been stillborn. — Madeleine L'Engle

Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth. — Beryl Markham

Keep moving forward until we find something better to do," Hinchcliffe replied. "Maybe find the nursery for the dog-demons. I'd rather kill them stillborn." "I didn't know you were a Democrat, Staff Sergeant," Berg said with a grin. "Don't ask, don't tell, Two-Gun. — John Ringo

stillborn love notes provide small satisfaction — Jerome Charyn

My parents' marriage, begun with a pregnancy that produced a stillborn child, was itself stillborn - a union formed with expectation and promise that never delivered. — Bridgett M. Davis

When asked to give his opinion as to why airpower was stillborn in the U.S., with little funding or interest coming from the navy or army, he replied: Conservatism ... You see, the army and the navy are the oldest institutions we have. They place everything on precedent. You can't do that in the air business. You have got to look ahead. — James D. Bradley

As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.)
Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners - who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying - look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. "The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find," one miner told me wryly. — Amy Chua

Consciousness is a pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed. This is the chthonian drama that has no climax but only an enedless round, cycle upon cycle. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm. Free will is stillborn in the red cells of our body, for there is no free will in nature. Our choices come to us prepackaged and special delivery, molded by hands not our own. — Camille Paglia

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty") — John Crowley

Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child. — Wassily Kandinsky

Many promised him their voices: Fralegg the Strong, clever Alvyn Sharp, humpbacked Hotho Harlaw. Hotho offered him a daughter for his queen. "I have no luck with wives," Victarion told him. His first wife died in childbed, giving him a stillborn daughter. His second had been stricken by a pox. And his third ... "A king must have an heir," Hotho insisted. "The Crow's Eye brings three sons to show before the kingsmoot." "Bastards — George R R Martin

Then we drove out past the sandy lots of stillborn subdivisions that had gone silent in '08. Eventually, a gray wall appeared, blocking the view of the gated community from the street. — James Patterson

Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men
men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from Underground. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be. — Rene Dubos

I forgive the tears I was made to
shed,
I forgive the pain and the
disappointments,
I forgive the betrayals and the lies,
I forgive the slanders and intrigues,
I forgive the hatred and the
persecution,
I forgive the blows that hurt me,
I forgive the wrecked dreams,
I forgive the stillborn hopes,
I forgive the hostility and jealousy,
I forgive the indif erence and ill will,
I forgive the injustice carried out in
the name of justice,
I forgive the anger and the cruelty,
I forgive the neglect and the contempt,
I forgive the world and all its evils. — Paulo Coelho

I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it. — Ayn Rand

You are quite acute for a mental stillborn — Dan Simmons

Several times Tam paused to engage one man or another in brief conversation. Since he and Rand had not been off the farm for weeks, everyone wanted to catch up on how things were out that way. Few Westwood men had been in. Tam spoke of damage from winter storms, each one worse than the one before, and stillborn lambs, of brown fields where crops should be sprouting and pastures greening, of ravens flocking in where songbirds had come in years before. Grim talk, with preparations for Bel Tine going on all around them, and much shaking of heads. It was the same on all sides. Most of the men rolled their shoulders and said, "Well, we'll survive, the Light willing." Some grinned and added, "And if the Light doesn't will, we'll still survive." That was the way of most Two Rivers people. People who had to watch the hail beat their crops or the wolves take their lambs, and start over, no matter how many years it happened, did not give up easily. Most of those who did were long since gone. — Robert Jordan

Stillborn silence! thou that art Flood-gate of the deeper heart! — Richard Flecknoe

Work-worn, on a gingham towel draped over the cupboard. "All of them stillborn." I smother a sigh with a smile, weak and resigned. He takes it regardless. "Yeah ... " He too smiles soft, a hand letting — Ann Voskamp

I have outlived the stillborn. I have outlasted my usefulness. I have become an abysmal ocean sponge, ten millennia old, and just as wise. — Logan Ryan Smith

Most restaurants fail. The sad ones are stillborn. The mad ones flourish within the bustle and excitement of fame, notoriety, the thrill of the new. But they rarely sustain the glow. They are balloons kept aloft by a restless crowd. Only the strange, the freaks of restaurant perfection, can sustain life beyond a few years. — Sam Sifton

Who am I to claim such boundless sorrow? This heartache, acute and true as it may be, is slight compared to all of this world. Five miscarriages, two stillborn, three live births, and Mrs. Connor is one of our fortunate. She is not disemboweled in the snow. Her hands have committed no atrocities. She believes in God.
It is remarkable how we go on. All that we come to know and witness and endure, yet our hearts keep beating, our faith persists. — Eowyn Ivey

I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free. — Emil Cioran

I was stillborn. The midwives laid me aside, thought I was really gone. I laid there about an hour, and they picked me back up and tried again, 'cause my body was still warm. The Good Lord brought me back. — James Brown

I like to watch the way a model moves in my clothes, the way she gives them life, or if they are wrong, stillborn, the way her life rejects them. — Yves Saint-Laurent

No outbreak of jealousy or malice has ever been welcomed in God's eyes." Beatrix continued, "nor shall such an outbreak ever be welcomed in the eyes of your family. If you have sentiments within you that are unpleasant or uncharitable, let them fall stillborn to the ground. — Elizabeth Gilbert

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind's sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature's plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical. — Maxine Kumin

Tell us again, for we forget, that work done without love is stillborn, mindless, and lost in the very hour of its deliverance. — Ray Bradbury

I was very upset at how his skin was peeling off so badly anywhere, but nobody gave it a second thought. They told me it was 'normal'.
Of course this was far from normal. There was no way they could have known about EB (Epidermolysis Bullosa) back then considering the rarity of the disorder. The only way to diagnose EB it is through a skin biopsy, and they would need to suspect EB to send it to the correct lab. It would not be until Nicky was born 21 months later that every Doctor imaginable was all of a sudden extremely interested in seeing photos of Alex. "Oh yeah" the dermatologist that diagnosed Nicky and Doctor McGuire at Stanford said to me unequivocally, "Alex for sure had EB." How EB could have caused his demise though is still a mystery. Doctor Marinkovich at Stanford told me that many babies with EB are indeed stillborn, but could not tell me why. At this point however, in the delivery room, we were completely oblivious about EB and would remain so for nearly two years — Silvia Corradin

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works. — Wassily Kandinsky

Eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, every choice avoided. And all unlived life will remain bulging inside you, unlived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of your conscience will cry out to you forever. — Irvin D. Yalom

Most ideas are stillborn and need the breath of life injected into them through definite plans of immediate action. The time to nurse an idea is at the time of its birth. Every minute it lives gives it a better chance of surviving. — Napoleon Hill

It (the talking, the telling) seemed (to him, to Quentin) to partake of that logic- and reason-flouting quality of a dream which the sleeper knows must have occurred, stillborn and complete, in a second, yet the very quality upon which it must depend to move the dreamer (verisimilitude) to credulity _horror or pleasure or amazement_ depends as completely upon a formal recognition of and acceptance of elapsed and yet-elapsing time as music or a printed tale. — William Faulkner

Instead he thinks up the worst ending imaginable: Hemingway has Catherine die from
hemorrhaging after their child is stillborn. It is the most torturous ending I have ever
experienced and probably will ever experience in literature, movies, or even television.
I am crying so hard at the end, partly for the characters, yes, but also because Nikki
actually teaches this book to children. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to
expose impressionable teenagers to such a horrible ending. Why not just tell high school
students that their struggle to improve themselves is all for nothing? — Matthew Quick

My mother desperately wanted children. She had a child that was stillborn - something I learned when I was looking through her 'effects' after she had died. It was then that I discovered my original birth certificate, which indicated the previous birth. — Stanley Hauerwas