Gestation Quotes

Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life.

One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

The pregnant quarry teem'd with human form.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.

The Qur'an describes the stages of embryonic development (22:4, 23:12-14) and states that at a certain point during development, the fetus is given a soul. According to the jurists and their interpretation of a related hadith, the ensoulment occurs somewhere between 40 and 120 days of gestation (Musallam, p.53-4). Based on these references all of the major jurists agreed that the fetus did not become endowed with a human spirit until at least 40 days of gestation had occurred. Some felt that this did not occur until 120 days of gestation. In reviewing historical documents of Medieval Islamic jurists, Musallam argues that abortion was considered a form of birth control which was essentially allowed by all of the major juristic positions

Everything is gestation and then birthing.

Pope Julius set the date for Christmas in the 4th Century... The real reasopn fpr the selection of December 25 seems to have been that it was exactly 9 months after March 25, the traditional date for Jesus' crucifixion ... As Christians developed the theological idea that Jesus was concieved and executed on the same date [of the year], they set the date of his birth 9 months later.

What I think is important about essayists, about the essay as opposed to a lot of personal writing is that the material has to be presented in a processed way. I'm just not interested in writing, "Hey, this is what happened to me today." You get to a place that has very little to do with your personal experience and talks about some larger idea or something in the culture. I don't think you can get to that unless you have had a lot of time to gestate and maybe if I was taking a lot of notes while stuff was going on, I wouldn't be able to get to that place as easily.

Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.