birth symbolism Quotes

A lot of cultures believe you take the placenta and you bury it and plant something.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.

What interests me, ... is why people are so repelled when, after all, everyone started life attached. In a sense, the twins have never been born because they are still tied by an umbilical cord. Relationships between women - daughters, mothers, friends - are one of my strong interests.

As soon as a baby enters the world, the baby is immediately introduced to pain. It is somewhat symbolic that life begins with a cry.

In most cultures, men represent tradition and women represent change and future. Women, because of their ability to give birth, are more connected to future. Men tend to keep the status quo.

The day you were born, a ladder was set up to help you escape this world.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

[On the ancient Venus figurines:] If the central religious figure was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life - rather than death and the fear of death - were dominant in society as well as art.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas.

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.

Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession's phlegm, and needs no ancestors.

In the dark room where I began My mother's life made me a man. Through all the months of human birth Her beauty fed my common earth. I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir, But through the death of some of her.