Born Bayou Quotes

I'm not worried about my father. If anybody understands taking a woman captive to ensure keeping her - he does. You can't grow up in a family like mine and not be a stalker. When we love, we obsess. We love like crazy until it gets in our bones, fucks with our minds, and takes over our soul. ~ Suzanne Steele

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. ~ Russell Means

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all. ~ V.S. Naipaul

A born-again Christian should no more think of going back to the old life than an adult to his childhood. ~ Billy Graham

My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder. ~ Anne Wojcicki

Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself. ~ Andres Serrano

Talia, born in 1995. They divorced in 2003, but she kept ~ D.D. VanDyke

The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land. ~ Ken Burns

I'd like to run away, to flee from what I know, from what is mine, from what I love. I want to set off, not for some impossible Indies or for the great islands that lie far to the south of all other lands, but for anywhere, be it village or desert, that has the virtue of not being here. What I want is not to see these faces, this daily round of days. I want a rest from, to be other than, my habitual pretending. I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest. A hut by the sea, even a cave on a rugged mountain ledge, would be enough. Unfortunately, my will alone cannot give me that.

Slavery is the only law of life, there is no other, because this law must be obeyed; there is no possible rebellion against it or refuge from it. Some are born slaves, some become slaves, some have slavery thrust upon them. The cowardly love we all have of freedom -which if it were given to us we would all repudiate as being too new and strange –is the irrefutable proof of how our slavery weighs upon us. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I get so disenfranchised reading the news, because global borders and lines we've created are completely unnecessary. That's just another person on the other side, and it's his bad luck that he was born there and it's my good fortune that I was born here. It's all kind of illogical. ~ Eddie Huang

The person who judges you without getting to know you has revealed nothing about you but exposes everything about himself to the world. The prudent one knows that true knowledge is not born out of ignorance but a desire to know before casting judgement. ~ Crystal Evans

Isaiah calls the Church barren because her children are born without effort by the Word of faith through the Spirit of God. It is a matter of birth, not of exertion. ~ Martin Luther

I believe a man is born first unto himself - for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Persons born in wealth and luxury seldom achieve greatness. They were not born for labour; and, without labour, nothing that is worth having can be won. ~ Maria Susanna Cummins

Well, another female child is born into the world! Last Sunday afternoon, Harriot Eaton Stanton - oh! the little heretic thus to desecrate that holy holiday - opened her soft blue eyes on this mundane sphere. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

When an unbaked pot is broken, the potter can use the mud to make a new one; but when a baked one is broken, he cannot do the same any longer. So when a person dies in a state of ignorance, he is born again; but when he becomes well baked in the fire of true knowledge and dies a perfect man, he is not born again. ~ Ramakrishna

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. ~ Thomas Merton

You were born to overcome. You are not destined to lose. ~ Jeremy Riddle

But never in the four hundred years now since I was born, have I ever seen anything to make me doubt whether God exists in some form or the other. Not even the reflection in the mirror. ~ Stephenie Meyer

Our civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. On the tiger no responsibility rests. We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life - he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected. We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him perfect guidance... In this intermediate stage he wavers - neither drawn in harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will... We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle of free-will and instinct shall have been adjusted, when perfect understanding has given the former the power to replace the latter entirely, man will no longer vary. The needle of understanding will yet point steadfast and unwavering to the distant pole of truth. ~ Theodore Dreiser

As new chapters are born, old chapters die. Everything ceases at some point. I know its sad, but life goes on. ~ Tene Edwards

I was born in Fayette County, over in Lexington, Kentucky, but I was raised most of my life in Paintsville. ~ Chris Stapleton

If you knew what is was like to be another person, then how could you possibly do something which would cause pain? The problem, though, was that there seemed to be people in whom that imaginative part was just missing. It could be that they were born that way--with something missing from their brains--or it could be that they became like that because they were never taught by their parents to sympathise with others. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Both of you'll just have to believe me. Emma's one of those women who was born with… The thing is, the minute a heterosexual man looks at her, all he can think about is – well, her mouth, and – "

"Emma?" Torie's own mouth gaped in astonishment.

Patrick crossed his legs. "Maybe we're not talking about the same person. British accent? Good appetite? Hums songs from The Lion King when she doesn't think anybody's listening? ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope - in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang me: I was to see to that. ~ James Baldwin

you were last seen walking through a field of pianos. no. a museum of mouths. in the kitchen of a bustling restaurant, cracking eggs and releasing doves. no. eating glow worms and waltzing past my bedroom. last seen riding the subway, literally, straddling its metal back, clutching electrical cables as reins. you were wearing a dress made out of envelopes and stamps, this was how you travelled. i was the mannequin in the storefront window you could have sworn moved. the library card in the book you were reading until that dog trotted up and licked your face. the cookie with two fortunes. the one jamming herself through the paper shredder, afraid to talk to you. the beggar, hat outstretched bumming for more minutes. the phone number on the bathroom stall with no agenda other than a good time. the good time is a picnic on water, or a movie theatre that only plays your childhood home videos and no one hushes when you talk through them. when they play my videos i throw milk duds at the screen during the scenes i watch myself letting you go – lost to the other side of an elevator – your face switching to someone else's with the swish of a geisha's fan. my father could have been a travelling salesman. i could have been born on any doorstep. there are 2,469,501 cities in this world, and a lot of doorsteps. meet me on the boardwalk. i'll be sure to wear my eyes. do not forget your face. i could never. ~ Megan Falley

This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us. ~ Asghar Abbas

I've accepted the fact that there's a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals! ~ Yvon Chouinard

A range of studies shows there is no evidence immigrants commit more crime than native-born Americans. In fact, first generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans. The two cities in this country most impacted by undocumented immigrants, you would think of the New York City with over 500,000 and Los Angeles, with a similar amount. Both those cities are among the safest in the free world. ~ Geraldo Rivera

The ONLY thing you should be saying to be is that you recognize that you were born into a racist, white supremacist system that imbued you with racist ideals from birth. That you recognize your racism, privilege, and inherent bias and are actively working to unlearn it. If you are not saying that then you are not saying anything, and you don't have permission to speak to me. ~ Seren Sensei

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales, ~ Jeffrey Kluger

When were you born, who are your parents, where did you grow up? None of us earns these things. These things were given to us. So when we strip away all of our luck and our privilege, and we consider where we'd be without them, it becomes much easier to see someone who's poor and say, "That could be me." And that's empathy. ~ Melinda Gates

We all live in a tragicomic situation, a life that is in part absurd simply because it is not of our own making. We are born into a disordered world, into a family we did not choose, into circumstances we would have had somewhat improved, and we are even called by a name we did not select. (40) ~ Sheldon B. Kopp

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born. My brother and I were born in London ... but our descent, our interest and our joy were in the north country'.
Quoted in The Tale of Beatrix Potter a Biography by Margaret Lane, First Edition p 32-33 ~ Beatrix Potter

I was born in Saratoga, Texas, a little town there in the Big Thicket about 60 miles north of Beaumont. Needless to say, we were very, very poor, but we always managed to have enough to keep our bellies full. ~ George Jones

States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them ~ Niccolo Machiavelli