c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness. I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense or transport may surpass my own.
— Emily Dickinson
... the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
You cannot have too many aconites. They cost, as I said before, about fifty shillings a thousand. A thousand will make a brave splash of colour, which lasts a month. If you can afford ten thousand, you are mad not to buy them. There are so many exciting places you can put them. . . in the hollow of a felled tree, by the border of a pond, in a circle round a statue, or immediately under your window, so that you can press your nose against the glass, when it is too cold to go out, and stare at them, and remember that spring is on its way.
— Beverley Nichols
In the garden of my heartFlowers of loves were bloomingNot just to express the beauty But to spread the fragrance Of happiness.
— Debasish Mridha
Because the bag is full of colours - starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.
— M.R. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts
Truth cannot be changed. When all the flowers of the world are dead, there will still be a true thing that is a flower.
— Clara Winter, Tintagel
Flowers are the music of the earth.
— Marty Rubin
I don't like flowers, chocolate, cakes or diamonds either, I am definitely not a hard one to impress.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
If you are a sensitive person, you don’t give flowers to others, because you know that the flowers – these miraculous beauties and the wondrous jewels of our cosmos – excessively deserve to live!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker us; we are children, not pets; she is not fond; everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us: what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
They were no longer standing the way he'd stood them, no longer engaged in the glorious basking that overwhelmed him on the headland. They were leaning toward the light now, craning toward it. He’d been dead wrong about the blitheness. The buttercups now seemed to know — to understand with that purely physical knowledge that all living things possess — that something was wrong. Their craning was like a cry: they were calling out with all the body language they possessed for a life or a place they had no minds with which to remember.
— David James Duncan
Lancelot and Guinevere – they looked like two flowers, bright enough to turn to each other for sunlight.
— Clara Winter, Tintagel
I love to see the bud bursting into maturity; I love to mark the deepening tints with which the beams of heaven paint the expanded flower; nay, with a melancholy sort of pleasure, I love to watch that progress towards decay, so endearingly bespeaking a fellowship in man's transient glory
— Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Chapters on Flowers
In most gardens", the Tiger-lily said, "they make the beds too soft-so that the flowers are always asleep.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white;Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee;Fairies use flower for their charactery.
— William Shakespeare
It must be a real betrayal, when your body turns against you. I wonder if she likes flowers. All the bits of you that can go wrong...I don't like flowers, not really. I like growing them, but that's only because I like seeing them blossom, and seeing them 
— Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones
Here is a dream-life: A life amongst the flowers!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
And, indeed it is a very pleasant thing for to ride forth in the dawning of a Springtime day. For then the little birds do sing their sweetest song, all joining in one joyous medley, whereof one may scarce tell one note from another, so multitudinous is that pretty roundelay; then do the growing things of the earth smell the sweetest in the freshness of the early daytime—the fair flowers, the shrubs, and the blossoms upon the trees; then doth the dew bespangle all the sward as with an incredible multitude of jewels of various colors; then is all the world sweet and clean and new, as though it had been fresh created for him who came to roam abroad so early in the morning.
— Howard Pyle, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights
Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy’s tired of you, so what, there’s guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they’re wilted. But you have to act like you’re having a spectacular time and every day’s a party.
— Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
So long, I replied, may we all have one good flight before we rest among flowers and the orbits of hungry worms.
— Rawi Hage, Carnival
Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur.
— John Fowles, The Magus
The Scarcity of Flowers in the society made guys settle for weeds and grasses.... Trust me i'll rather import a Rose than being contended with thorns.
— GoalsRider
There is nothing in the world more pathetic than a bunch of wilted dandelions.
— Shannon Wiersbitzky, What Flowers Remember
Amongst the flowers you always feel yourself you are endlessly far away from all the dangers!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Summer brings sunshine, warm and flowering.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
When considering female human beings, we should ask ourselves what kind of organisms become overjoyed when presented with decapitated plants as gifts? I suppose we should consider ourselves fortunate they do not become overjoyed when presented with decapitated animals as gifts.
— Robert  Black
When tended the right way, beauty multiplies.
— Shannon Wiersbitzky, What Flowers Remember
All the men send you orchids because they're expensive and they know that you know they are. But I always kind of think they're cheap, don't you, just because they're expensive. Like telling someone how much you paid for something to show off.
— Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rock; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disc; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus-flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
And so we are like flowers; and bloom only, when the sun, kisses us.
— Kristian Goldmund Aumann, Love Poems
She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds.
— A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok
Little flowers get more attention than the big mountains simply because they emit love around themselves!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
A person who takes a concrete place and convert it into a garden of flowers is a real magician!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Killing flowers for our own happiness is a wrong attitude, it is a wrong culture! We must change this attitude and abolish this culture! Let the flowers live!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The shrub that half concealed her was a malignant plant, a Madagascan tanghin tree with wide, box-like leaves with whitish stems, whose smallest veins distilled a venomous fluid. At a moment when Louise and Maxime laughed more loudly in the reflected yellow light of the sunset in the little boudoir, Renée, her mind wandering, her mouth dry and parched, took between her lips a sprig of the tanghin tree that was level with her mouth, and sank her teeth into one of its bitter leaves.
— Émile Zola, La Curée
Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.
— Yann Martel, Self
I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with her”.
— Marc Chagall
Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was "having a bad spell," Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. ("When I was a girl," she had once told a friend, "I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough...")
— Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
No flower is happy in a vase, because vase is nothing but an ornate coffin for the flower.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There is so much hope in a little flower and so many flowers in a little hope!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Heat in her birds of prey fingertips, smoke of gilded flowers in her aureate gorging hair.
— Laura Gentile, Seraphic Addiction
Flowers are almost perfect
—  their only flaw is that they are weak
Wildflowers burst from the ground in vivid blues and whites and violets, creating a picture more pleasing than anything her hands could design. She didn't understand how it was possible, but Evan had been right. The abundance of snow had produced an abundance of wildflowers. More than she's ever seen before. Somehow, those cold, lifeless winter months had prepared the land for something breathtaking. Something beautiful. Something brimming with life.
— Katie Ganshert, Wildflowers from Winter
I'm on the side of whatever keeps the flowers growing.
— Marty Rubin
Flowers are so inconsistent!
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Gabby, I told you I'd give you space, but I never said I wouldn't fill your space with flowers. Brad
— Beth Michele, Love Love
Somewhere on the world was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, rainbowed with flowers.
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation
The real wealth of a good gardener is not his salary but the marvellous flowers he is raising in the garden!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
How right it is to love flowers and the greenery of pines and ivy and hawthorn hedges
—  they have been with us from the very beginning.
Texting and phone calls, fireworks, blends, café au lait, and music. Yesterday's television. Work and beer. The neighbor's dog, or those strange flowers, the way it smells at Maisen. Those ordinary things I talk about with you. With you... I want to talk about love with you.
— Tomoko Yamashita, 恋の話がしたい [Koi no Hanashi ga Shitai]
I always notice flowers.
— Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol's Party Book
Any noseMay ravage with impunity a rose.
— Robert Browning, Sordello
Cerulean left. I wondered if she was from Flower Planet. Blue flowers were rare - one might take a name from that.
— Stephenie Meyer, The Host
Ephemerals: That's what Hub called them; flowers that bloomed and died in a matter of weeks, before the trees leafed out and shaded them. She liked the way the word sounded in her head. I am an ephemeral. It made her feel like something passing and precious.
— Pamela Todd, The Blind Faith Hotel
Flowers are like the sweet babies of the nature
—  they make us to smile.
A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.
— Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be mt flowers.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Well, think about it for a minute. A guy tells you that he loves you and then turns around and buys you flowers…or worse, tells you that he loves you with flowers. Cut flowers die. They die in a few days after being cut…and this is what you guys choose to use as proof of your love? Something that dies in a few days? To me it seems like foreshadowing or something, like your basically saying that our love is beautiful but only for a limited time and then it will wither away to nothing like your flowers.
— Jennifer Snyder, The Unloved
Flowers represent hope for us
—  but we do not represent hope for them! Let us keep the flowers in the soil
You want to do something good for the flowers? Then, keep the flowers in the soil, in nowhere else!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
She’d never seen such a thing back on Grave
—  a flower that bloomed only at night.
...You won't get eternal life by just feeling the presence of God in flowers or music.
— C.S. Lewis
There are no flowers in the Moon
—  that’s why the Moon is a boring place!
In the cold dark days of the winter, dream about the flowers to get warmed up!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There Albine lay, panting, exhausted by love, her hands clutched closer and closer to her heart, breathing her last. She parted her lips, seeking the kiss which should obliterate her, and then the hyacinths and tuberoses exhaled their incense, wrapping her in a final sigh, so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses, and in this culminating gasp of blossom, Albine was dead.
— Émile Zola, La Faute de l'abbé Mouret
may flowers smell their scent!
— Hakan
I thought he knew me better than most...Then one nigh Jack brought me flowers, a handful of fading daisies he'd picked up at a farm stand, but flowers all the same. That was the end; that was how he ruined everything.
— Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen
Down close to certain flowersall excesses are sufficiencies
— David Giannini
Don't wait until people are dead to give them flowers.
— Sean Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide
I came hoping to see those eyes, but instead I return with my heart, leaving behind only flowers.
— Kim Dong Hwa
I believe in roses. Oh God, yes! I do believe in roses! And I believe in lots and lots and lots of them, too!
— C. JoyBell C.
There has fallen a splendid tearFrom the passion-flower at the gate.She is coming, my dove, my dear;She is coming, my life, my fate.The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;"And the lily whispers, "I wait."She is coming, my own, my sweet;Were it ever so airy a tread,My heart would hear her and beat,Were it earth in an earthy bed;My dust would hear her and beat,Had I lain for a century dead,Would start and tremble under her feet,And blossom in purple and red.
— Alfred Tennyson
Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, and left the flushed print in a poppy there.
— Francis Thompson
She opened her sketchbook, carefully tore out several pages and handed them to Nasser--three detailed color sketches of three flowers. Leafing through the pages, he translated the message. A petunia: Your presence soothes me. A peppermint flower: warmth of feeling. And heartsease, the flower he'd given her so many times before.You occupy my thoughts."I've been doing a lot of reading," Lee said quietly, setting her sketchbook aside. "You're not the only one who knows what flowers mean.
— Kaye Thornbrugh, Flicker
I have no heroes except flowers and children.
— Marty Rubin
I once saw many flowers blooming Upon my way, in indolence I scorned to pick them in my going And passed in proud indifference.Now, when my grave is dug, they taunt me; Now, when I'm sick to death in pain, In mocking torment still they haunt me, Those fragrant blooms of my disdain.
— Heinrich Heine
In a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives.
— Hal Borland
The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded itself in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset-cloud was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string music has announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.
— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
A daffodil bulb will divide and redivide endlessly. That's why, like the peony, it is one of the few flowers you can find around abandoned farmhouses, still blooming and increasing in numbers fifty years after the farmer and his wife have moved to heaven, or the other place, Boca Raton. If you dig up a clump when no one is nearby and there is no danger of being shot, you'll find that there are scores of little bulbs in each clump, the progeny of a dozen or so planted by the farmer's wife in 1942. If you take these home, separate them, and plant them in your own yard, within a couple of years, you'll have a hundred daffodils for the mere price of a trespassing fine or imprisonment or both. I had this adventure once, and I consider it one of the great cheap thrills of my gardening career. I am not advocating trespassing, especially on my property, but there is no law against having a shovel in the trunk of your car.
— Cassandra Danz, Mrs. Greenthumbs: How I Turned a Boring Yard into a Glorious Garden and How You Can, Too
Flowers have the greatest talent in converting an ordinary place into a magical palace!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
She would also be creating her own bridal bouquet. She wanted to feel the fragility and softness of each petal. And to make the single flowers stronger than they’d been separately. Just as she was stronger now, together with people who loved and accepted her.
— Liz Grace Davis, Tangi's Teardrops: A Single Tear Will Change Everything...
...God sometimes sends flowers -but I like it best when he darkens the sky and lights up an infinitude of worlds...
— John Geddes
Moss is selected to be the emblem of maternal love, because, like that love, it glads the heart when the winter of adversity overtakes us, and when summer friends have deserted us.
— Henrietta Dumont
Vase[Why weep Come back tomorrow There are also poisonous flowers and flowers always open in the evening she loves the cinema she has been in Russia Love married with disdain Pearl-studded watch a trip to Montrouge Maisons- Lafitte and everything finishes in perfumes remember Let the flower bloom and let the fruit rot and let the grain sprout while the storms rage]
— Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War
Instead of putting flowers in books to flatten them you can use a brick.
— Nicole McKay, A bit of rubbish about a Brick and a Blanket
Remember this, for it is as true and true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.
— Ina May Gaskin, Ina May's Guide to Childbirth
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers--strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength.
— Barbara Katz Rothman
He came into the world like a delivery that no one knew what to do with, and nobody wanted to sign for.
— Obert Skye, Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo
Fo' Gawd, Miss Scarlett! We's got ter have a doctah. Ah- Ah- Miss Scarlett, Ah doan know nuthin' 'bout bringin' babies. -Prissy
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding.
— Frank A. Oski
Of course, if 40% of women need oxytocin to progress normally, then something is wrong with the definition of normal.
— Henci Goer, Obstetric Myths Versus Research Realities: A Guide to the Medical Literature
It's the strangest feeling at the end of pregnancy: you look down at this huge belly and try to imagine how some little person, whom you haven't even met, is going to emerge from it any day and completely change your lives. First, you wonder how this pregnancy, to which you've grown so accustomed over much of the last year, can, with barely any notice, come to an abrupt end. Then you try to fathom how this baby is ever going to come out; your bowling ball stomach seems misproportioned for what lies between it and the outside world. And only then do you realize what it all means-that the easy part, pregnancy, is almost over, and it's time to gear up for the tough stuff: childbirth!
— Lise Eliot, What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life
The midwife considers the miracle of childbirth as normal, and leaves it alone unless there's trouble. The obstetrician normally sees childbirth as trouble; if he leaves it alone, it's a miracle.
— Sheila Stubbs
I am what the water gave me, / a smoke-ring in a jar, / the braided rope / my ladder-to-the-light, / my shivering bird heart / caught
— Pascale Petit, What the Water Gave Me
Yes, contractions can be intense,' Noura continues. 'But your bodies are designed to handle it. And what you must remember is, it's a positive pain. I'm sure you'll both agree?' She looks over at Mum and Janice.POSITIVE?' Janice looks up, horrified. 'Ooh, no, dear. Mine was agony. 24 hours in the cruel summer heat. I wouldn't wish it on any of you poor girls.'But there are natural methods you can use,' Noura puts in quickly. 'I'm sure you found that rocking and changing position helped with the contractions.I wouldn't have said so,' Mum says kindly.Or a warm bath?' Noura suggets, smile tightening.A bath? Dear, when you're gripped by agony and wanting to die, a bath doesn't really help!'As I glance around the room I can see that all the girls' faces have frozen. Most of the mens' too.
— Sophie Kinsella, Shopaholic & Baby
Imagine the state of one's mind if they were to recall its details. All those months cocooned and then the onslaught of this ugly world. Lights and noise and strangeness. It's no wonder we scream with terror at our birth.
— Melina Marchetta, Quintana of Charyn
Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early twenty-first century, we do not know what normal birth is.' Most practicing obstetricians have never witnessed an unplugged birth that wasn't an accident. Women are even beginning to deny normal birth to themselves: if 'normal' means being induced, immobilized by wires and tubes, sped up with drugs, all the while knowing that there's a good chance of surgery, well, might as well just cut to the chase, so to speak. 'Just give me a cesarean,' some are saying. And who can blame them? They want to avoid what they think of as normal birth.
— Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care
I erupt from the dark, crushing tunnel into a flash of light and noise. A new kind of air surrounds me, dry and cold, as they wipe the last smears of home off my skin. I feel a sharp pain as they snip something, and suddenly I am less. I am no one but myself, tiny and feeble and utterly alone. I am lifted and swungthrough great heights across yawning distances, and given to Her. She wraps around me, so much bigger and softer than I ever imagined from inside,and I strain my eyes open. I see Her. She is immense, cosmic. She is the world. The world smiles down on me, and when She speaks it’s the voice of God, vast and resonant with meaning, but words unknowable, ringing gibberish in my blank white mind.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
...the total number of pregnancies in which powerful and dangerous drugs are used is 60 percent, or nearly two-thirds of all births. It is rediculous to think that two-thirds of American women have such lousy uteruses that they must be whipped into shape with drugs in order to have babies.
— Marsden Wagner, Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First
Are you sure you weren't adopted?""Mom would like to think so, but it was a natural birth, so her memory's real clear.
— Jana Deleon, Unlucky
We are assumed to be rather hopeless -- swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.
— Elizabeth Berg, Range Of Motion
Ina May Gaskin is the most important person in maternity care in North America, bar none.
— Marsden Wagner, Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First
It’s hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I’m bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I’m still to be born and I can’t quite manage it.
— Clarice Lispector
...there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Oh my God!” Sam said again, his voice shaking. I’ve given birth to something inhuman, Phoebe thought. A lamprey with row after row of teeth.
— Jennifer McMahon, Don't Breathe a Word
... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.
— Amin Maalouf, Orígenes
One way to measure a particular doctor's openness and attitude toward women in general is simply to ask about the doctor's opinion of midwifery.
— Marsden Wagner, Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First
Beyond the immediate risks to her health and the health of her baby, when a woman chooses c-section, she decreases the chance that she will be able to get pregnant again and increases the chance that if she does get pregnant, the pregnancy will occur outside the uterus, a situation that never results in a live baby and is life-threatening to the woman. Furthermore, the risk of having an unexplained stillbirth doubles when a woman has had a previous c-section.
— Marsden Wagner, Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First
Among industrialized countries, the U.S. ranks 29th in infant survival.
— Jennifer Block
But after years of teaching, we have decided that a lot of mothers just aren't reading textbooks.
— Susan McCutcheon, Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way
Only birth can conquer death—the birth , not of the old thing again, but of something new .
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
To create something does not mean to see through to its depths; we do not drain our children to the dregs by begetting them, but set them loose in the world like wild dogs, beyond our control and often beyond our knowledge.
— Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures
Má leaves me but I'm not alone, and a terrifying thought creeps into my head. Family is now something I have created and not just something I was born into.
— Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do
No matter where I went, where I’ve gone, what I’ve seen and what I’ve done…you have never not been wit’ me. You’ve always been my home.
— M Robinson
We are sentenced to die the day we are born.
— Gary Mark Gilmore
I love them both as though I birthed them both, but also as though I adopted them both.
— Natalie Brenner, This Undeserved Life: Uncovering The Gifts of Grief and The Fullness of Life
There are things in this life that you must face alone. Birth is one of them-death is another.
— Kayla Krantz, The Council
I can feel myself holding a child, thought Joanna. Sleep, my child, sleep, I tell you. The child is warm and I am sad.
— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
It's one thing to be bitter about the circumstances of your birth, but another to drill your bitterness into the head of someone going through a rough time.
— Kayla Krantz, The Council
What I would be quite wise to remember is that ‘pieces’ are not the end of what was, but the beginning of what is to be.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sure, things die. Yet hard on the heels of every death there comes a birth. And if the life around me is being perpetually refreshed in such a relentless manner, why would I think that the life within me can’t have the same experience.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often our lives are soiled to desperation by endings that in reality are magnificently outnumbered by beginnings. And unless we become convinced that an ending is always the birthplace of a beginning that is on its way, we will live terribly soiled lives.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
From beginning to end, we are all alone.
— Saif Samir
Kasturi was in the seventh month of gestating Coinman—a high-attention and high-priority stage of a pregnancy—a time that requires utmost care in bringing one life safely to the world without losing the other.
— Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
When you are born, outside world already exists. When you begin to understand life, all you acquire is the outside world’s beliefs, and different experiences and impressions from the outside world. In the process, you forget to know the person, who entered into this earth and the purpose of his birth.
— Roshan Sharma
Miseries of a birth.
— Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
The most basic elements of our life—our birth and our death—are out of our control. People spend a lifetime trying to control these things but it’s impossible.
— Darien Gee, Friendship Bread
A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.
— Iain M. Banks, Excession
5 mins after your birth, they decide your name, nationality, religion & sect & you spend rest of your life defending something you didn't choose.
— Nilesh jain
There are two events in everybody’s life that nobody remembers. Two moments experienced by every living thing. Yet no one remembers anything about them. Nobody remembers being born and nobody remembers dying. Is that why we always stare into the eye sockets of a skull? Because we’re asking, “What was it like?” “Does it hurt?” “Are you still scared?”.
— Steven Moffat
We all knew where the goop originated and could have defended ourselves, but the origin of the fusillade doubled as the center of the action. Once the baby’s scalp protruded, we all hunkered down and braced ourselves.
— David Z. Hirsch, Didn't Get Frazzled
Something was nagging at me that I was trying to resist. Was it then or was it later that the thought came to me: if God really does exist, and is not just a myth, it must have a consequence for the whole of life. It was not a comfortable thought.
— Jennifer Worth
I think I'll name her Amber - for the colour of her father's eyes.
— Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber
He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.
— Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
― all you have to do is kill every citizen at birth and then, by God, you're left with the perfect ―
— William Marshall, The Far Away Man
The sadness began later, in waves as crushing as the contractions had been,
— Ruth Ahmed, When Ali Met Honour
Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, “Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee.” (Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.)
— Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family
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, The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour
A child's name is his portal to the world.
— George Hagen, The Laments
Death was the Earth. Having sprung from her, the budding forms of life attempted to liberate themselves from her embrace. They set their sights on the free and open spaces. Death let them do as they wished, because she was very partial to the idea of life. She contented herself with keeping a watchful eye on her flock, and when she felt that they were fully ripe she devoured them up as if they were so many morsels of sugar. The she lay back and slowly digested the nourishment that would replenish her womb, happy and satiated as a pampered cat.
— Roland Topor, The Tenant
To blithely discard the spent kernels of something that has ended is to discard the very resources that have painstakingly been harvested from that ending from which a spirited new beginning will be cultivated.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Autumn's Journey: Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons
The baby, when he or she is ready to be born, will send a message that tells the mother’s body that it is ready. The mother’s body can then begin labour by slowly releasing oxytocin, the hormone of love. The mother and baby work together to bring the baby into the world.
— Ruth Ehrhardt, The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour
Birth is vast and multifaceted; radiant and mysterious. Birth contains multitudes, and through her we birth our multitudes. We give birth to our hopes and our fears, to our ecstasies and our agonies, to our joy and our disappointments. We give birth to our babies, each one perfect and radiant. We give birth through our instincts, and we give birth to our instincts. We give birth to our capacity for instincts, which will match us perfectly with our babies, who are, and always will be, instinctive creatures. May we all be blessed through instinctive birth.
— Sarah Buckley
Increase is so natural that it starts from before we taste the first breath of life at birth
— Sunday Adelaja
Animals give birth to children, so that alone is not an argument strong enough to make a human a man. Otherwise goats, dogs and pigs could beat us to the game, because they could do in one go what will take man years to accomplish. A woman can only give birth to a number of kids at a time, in a year, while some animals could give birth to as many as tens of breeds in a year.
— Sunday Adelaja
Will was dead, but Missouri Ann was going to have a baby. Birth and death were God's way, she told herself. Joy and sorrow were joined together.
— Sandra Dallas, A Quilt for Christmas
Everything seems to work with a recurring rhythm except life. There is only one birth and only one death. Nothing else is like that.
— John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown
We don't object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance.
— Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos
Don't be sad because i'm dying, be happy because very second another great human being is born, another great person who gets the chance to do better things than i did.
— Emma Claeys
The Word of God gives birth to thoughts about God and about the knowledge of God.
— Sunday Adelaja
Pregnancies and births happen in their own time, regardless of our conscious wishes, hopes, efforts, and fantasies. We may decide we want a child and make every effort to have one, and yet, whether it happens or not is beyond the control of even the most desirous and diligent of couples. And even when a pregnancy does occur, when the surprise moment of conception is confirmed, doctors give us a due date which can only be an approximation, for when and how the baby arrives is also a matter beyond determination. For this reason, in my opinion, almost nothing more than a pregnancy and birth deserve to be called synchronistic: the random coincidence of one of millions of sperm meeting a particular egg, yet from this coincidence, which we do not ultimately control, grows all of life. Is there any more significant coincidence that we experience?
— Robert Hopcke
We were born between Oh Yeah& Goddammit. I knew lifeBegan where I stood in the dark,Looking out into the light,& that sometimes I could seeEverything through nothing.The backyard trees breathedLike a man running from himselfAs my brothers backed awayFrom the screendoor.
— Yusef Komunyakaa
I once heard that contractions are like this: a belt around your middle that is tightened agonizingly in ever elongating instances that arrange themselves in a pattern of pain.
— Emma Rose Kraus, A Blue One
A goddess of dawnscooted under a zing of barbed wireto witness your birth.
— Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch
Who are we to question God’s decisions about where we’ll be born?…God does what He chooses without asking our opinions. Of that I’m sure.
— John Clarke
I told you before, I don’t want out of this marriage. And if you give me nothing but daughters for the next twenty years, I would consider myself blessed.
— Natasha Anders, The Unwanted Wife
I'd prefer to die in Texas when I'm old. They say most good things end the same way they started, and that's where I entered the world, so that's how I'll leave it. 
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading
Only rarely do doctors in training have the opportunity to sit continuously with laboring women for hours. Most are taught to intervene in the normal process so often and so early that they have never witnessed a normal labor and birth.
— Ina May Gaskin
It was even said that some birds spring to life in the tension of accidental chords being struck in the ether, a confluence of arbitrary sound waves from unrelated sources: a piano, a truck, a breaking bottle---a bird.
— Carl Watson, The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts
There's always this point in pregnancy when all of sudden you realize that there is this person inside of you, and somehow you are going to have to get them out. First you worry about getting pregnant, then staying pregnant, then dealing with the side effects of pregnancy, and then when you are feeling better and enjoying the fun part of getting to know the new baby's personality and habits, you realize that there is no turning back.
— M. B Antevasin
We do know that we are cheated from birth to the overcharge on our coffins.
— John Steinbeck, The Pearl
When a seed sprouts, it's a violent process. The skin breaks and splits in two. Something dies and something is born. Anytime you paint a strong or violent image, you may be expressing that part of yourself that's opening in order to let the new emerge.
— Michele Cassou, Life, Paint and Passion: Reclaiming the Magic of Spontaneous
It was difficult to anticipate—in these monsters with enormous, fantastic beaks which they opened wide immediately after birth, hissing greedily to show the backs of their throats, in these lizards with frail, naked bodies of hunchbacks—the future peacocks, pheasants, grouse or condors. Placed in cotton wool, in baskets, this dragon brood lifted blind, walleyed heads on thin necks, croaking voicelessly from their dumb throats.
— Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
If I can't have your babies, I'll damn sure deliver them!
— Frouwkje Denoo
Time is a function of memory; what does not pass through a smile flies away through dark. Celebrating passing time applies to the successful ones. Cheer on your birthday, you're among the lucky ones.
— Shady K. Hallab
So many women come to me saying, “I have lost too,and this one, and this one”. So many embryos retreatto flesh: the live cell of the mother. Don’t tell me that itwill happen for me, when the only sure thing is a miracle:the sperm nuzzling in its nest and the egg that opens, explodes.
— Zoë Brigley, Conquest
Love is the first feeling we felt since birth and the last thing will need in Death.
— Ricardo Luis Ivan I Geronimo
In the Bible, a woman was made from a man. In real life, a man is made from a woman.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Will I be some kid’s dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?...Which girl’s carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What’s she doing right now? What’s her name?
— David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
Death is like giving birth. Birth can be painful. Sometimes women die from giving birth. However, when the baby is born, all that pain (that was endured) vanishes in an instant. Love for that tiny baby makes one forget the pain, the fear. And as I’ve said before, love between mother and child is the highest experience, the closest to divine love. You might wonder about the parallel I’m making between birth and death. But I say to you, the fear and pain accompanying an awful death is over quickly. Beyond that portal one is suddenly in the light, in oneness and bliss…Just as a woman heals rapidly after childbirth and then is able to fall in love with her baby, those who pass over also are able to fall in love with a new life."-Kuan Yin (From "Oracle of Compassion: the Living Word of Kuan Yin
— Hope Bradford, Oracle of Compassion: The Living Word of Kuan Yin
Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began to grow. And thus the generations past were joined to the unknowable future.
— Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
In the baby’s roomThe city lights areMilkyIn the curtains… Breath Gentle as rain, Sleep Quiet as snowflakes
— John Geddes
I was born the same year the greatest automobile in the history of automobiles was created, the 1957 Chevrolet. Thank God only one of us had tail fins.
— Michael Buffalo Smith, Prisoner of Southern Rock: A Memoir
The context needs to be that the goal is a healthy mom. Because mothers never make decisions without thinking about that healthy baby. And to suggest otherwise is insulting and degrading and disrespectful.
— Jennifer Block, Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care
My child has to be an artist,because conceiving her will be the best artmy body has ever accommodated.
— Nomthandazo Tsembeni
In birth all things are kindred, the sounds me make universal to any species. We enter wailing of a lost world.
— Thomas Maltman, Little Wolves
One Must Always Remember That Birth, Old Age, Disease And Death Comes At Any Moment In Regardless Of Whom We Are Or What We Have In Forms Of Material Possession.
— Baba Tunde Ojo-Olubiyo
The past you lost is just like a dream. As you woke up new lifestarts. So, your actual birthday will be your death day.
— A.G. Sorachi
My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land... it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistanhumming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me either. I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San FranciscoChronicle. Somewhere over those mountains in the west slept the city where my harelipped brother and I had run kites. Somewhere over there, the blindfolded man from my dream had died a needless death. Once, over those mountains, I had made a choice. And now, a quarter of a century later, that choice had landed me right back on this soil.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Marquez was not born in Colombia.He was born in Macondo, And his Macondo is his La Mancha.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Quixote shines from Lorca and Picasso, From Dalí and El Greco, From the gloomy 'View of Toledo.' He was born before Cervantes.
— Dejan Stojanovic
A gardin is where you can find a whole spectrum of life, birth and death
— Tiffany Baker, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunder
— Guy de Maupassant, Original Maupassant Short Stories
Between each inhale and exhale we die and are reborn.
— Micheal Tsarion wordslessspoken
They say you can take someone who was born in Africa out of the bush but you can't take the bush out of someone born there....
— Lindsay Armstrong