#birth

Satan casts out Satan, it is only to enter afresh in a mightier, though more hidden power. Nothing can avail but this, that the new nature in its divine humility be revealed in power to take the place of the old, to become as truly our very nature as that ever was. ↗

— Andrew Murray

#regeneration #nature

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#death #grief #grieving #loss #miscarriage

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#death #dream #dying #life #twilight

She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother. ↗

— Denis Johnson

#heart #mother #birth

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#birth

Maura had decided sometime before Blue's birth that it was barbaric to order children about, and so Blue had grown up surrounded by imperative question marks. ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#raven-boys #birth

He squinted at me. "What are you wearing? Is that some new form of birth control? ↗

— Janet Evanovich

#birth

Hope drowned in shadows emerges fiercely splendid–– boldly angelic. ↗

— Aberjhani

#angels #courage #faith #haiku #haikus

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#sexual-personae #the-birth-of-the-western-eye #art

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. ↗

— George Santayana

#cure #death #enjoy #interval #save