Born In Shame Quotes

Shannon: Only the living suffered. Only they were riddled with guilt and regret and unanswered questions. ~ Nora Roberts

HIORDIS. Better no child, than one born in shame. DAGNY. In shame? HIORDIS. Dost thou forgot thy father's saying? Egil is the son of a leman; that was his word. DAGNY. A word spoken in wrath - why wilt thou heed it? HIORDIS. Nay, nay, Ornulf was right; Egil is weak; one can see he is no freeborn child. ~ Henrik Ibsen

How can the seed know that by dying in the soil it will become a great tree? It will not be there to witness the happening. How can the seed know that one day, if it dies, there will be great foliage, green leaves, great branches, and flowers and fruits? How can the seed know? The seed will not be there. The seed has to disappear before it can happen. The seed has never met the tree. The seed has to disappear and die. Only very few people have that much courage. It really needs guts to discover truth. You will die as yourself. You will certainly be born. ~ Rajneesh

But now, where the spirit of the Western nationalism prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means - by the manufacture of half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. This is poisoning the very fountainhead of humanity. It is discrediting the ideals, which were born of the lives of men who were our greatest and best. It is holding up gigantic selfishness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it
tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest
if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself
you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say Here at last is the thing I was made for. ~ C.S. Lewis

The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem-at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty. ~ Warren Buffett

Everyone freaks out. Sometimes the best we can do with fear is befriend it. Expect it and understand that fear will always reappear. Eventually it subsides. It will return. The real culprits are our knee jerk responses to fear and the way we try to avoid feeling fear, anxiety and shame. Don't get me wrong, wanting to feel better fast is a perfectly natural human impulse. It is healthy to seek relief when you feel hopelessly mired in the emotional soup. Calming down is an essential first step to accurately perceiving a problem and deciding what to do about it but the last thing you need to do is shut yourself off from fear and pain - either your own or the worlds. If there is one over riding reason why our world and relationships are in such a mess, is that we try to get rid of our anxiety, fear and shame as fast as possible, regardless of the long term consequences. In doing so, we blame and shame others and in countless ways, we unwittingly act against ourselves. We confuse our fear driven thoughts with what is right, best, necessary or true. ~ Harriet Lerner

There was this one model in French Elle. I can't imagine what it must be like to be her. She was brunette with big lips and was wearing this tight navy dress by Azzedine someone. She was so beautiful; and the choices she must have. and ... Oh, I would give it all up just to have been born that way because her life will be so easy. She won't have to think, and men will fall into her lap and ... It's all unfair and I don't want to even write it.
It will never change, and no one wants to admit it but being thin and pretty is the best thing a woman can be. ~ Rae Earl

... she continued to hurl abuse at me, it came in one long stream, passers-by sent us looks, but she didn't care, her fury, which I had always feared, had her in its grip. I felt like asking her to stop, asking her to be nice, I had apologised, and it wasn't as though I had done anything, there was no connection between our texts and the fact that I had been drinking with a guest from Norway, nor between the fact that I had got drunk and the pregnancy test she was holding in her hand, but she didn't see it like that, for her this was all the same, she was a romantic, she had a dream about the two of us, about love and our child, and my behaviour smashed that dream, or reminded her that it was a dream. I was a bad person, an irresponsible person, how could I even imagine becoming a father? How could I subject her to this? I walked beside her, burning with shame because people were looking at us, burning with guilt because I had been drinking and burning with terror because, in her unbridled rage, she went straight for me and the person I was. This was humiliating, but for as long as she was in the right, for as long as what she said was true – that this was the day we might find out if we were going to have a child and I had met her off the train drunk – I couldn't ask her to stop or tell her to go to hell. She was right, or she was within her rights, I would have to bow my head and put up with this.
It struck me that Eirik might be close by and bowed my head even lower, ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal ( ... ). There is a tendency ( ... ) for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious-because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe-some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others-some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men. ~ Harper Lee

It was a shame, but as Ron said, you couldn't have everything in life.. ~ J.K. Rowling

Christian mothers, if only you knew the future of distress and peril, of shame ill-restrained, that you prepare for your sons and daughters in imprudently accustoming them to live hardly clothed and in making them lose the sense of modesty, you should be ashamed of yourselves and of the harm done the little ones whom heaven entrusted to your care, to be reared in Christian dignity and culture. ~ Pope Pius XII

Memory, faith, and the natural world as both witness to the cycle of human life and healer to a questioning heart are at the core of this lovely and lyrical collection of poems. The weather changes, people come and go from cities and towns, babies are born, grow up and depart from their parents' arms, but still, the countryside and its rituals sustain the people and creatures who know how to read the signs of the seasons. In these pages, Laura Grace Weldon shares those signs with us; her poems are the fruit of a wonderful harvest. ~ Eleanor Lerman

Even at the time - twenty years old - I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant) ~ Isaac Babel

I was born an optimist, as I always say. If I wake up in the morning with a pain in my chest, I'll always assume it's indigestion. It will probably be the end of me! But it's true - that's the kind of person I am. ~ Terry Wogan

I think I've indulged in a pathological, chronic nostalgia over the years, which I've traced back to my childhood. I was the last of four children, born well after the other three, so I was left on my own in a big, quiet house where most of the people had left, and even the echoes of a happy family had all died out. ~ Guy Maddin

Born and raised in Paris, I am deeply attached to my city; we almost have half a century of love story together, where I have been truly completely faithful! The most beautiful city in the world is my city, yeepeeee! ~ Christian Louboutin

I find myself being attracted to dudes all the time. I'm like, 'Wow, that's a beautiful man.' There's no shame in it; that's how I feel. ~ Brendon Urie

Why hast thou made me born in this country, The inhabitant of which is satisfied with being a slave? ~ Muhammad Iqbal

So often, we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are considered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men. The men in my life - my father, Z.G., my husband, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my son - faced, to one degree or another, those great male battles, but their hearts - so fragile - wilted, buckled, crippled, corrupted, broke, or shattered when confronted with the losses women face every day...Our men try to act strong, but it is May, Yen-yen, Joy, and I who must steady them and help them bear their pain, anguish, and shame. ~ Lisa See

Nobody in this building asked to be born. You didn't ask to be you, bro. I didn't ask to be me. I didn't ask to have this skin. I didn't ask to be who I was, bro. Nobody in here asked that ... You didn't ask for that. You didn't ask to live where you live or anything. So when you see people, forgive them and accept, you feel me? You gotta open your mind and say, man, nobody asked to be born. Life is hard, kinda. ~ Brandon McCartney

We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn't take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. 'I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn't tell him to stop . . .' My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, 'No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?' And I didn't have any answer for that. ~ Louise O'Neill

No one is born a master. Each must grow in their own way. ~ Avina Celeste

Right now, with that lock of hair falling in his eyes, he's the brother I've missed, the one who once brought me stones from the sea, told me they were rajah's jewels. I want to tell him that I'm afraid I'm going mad by degrees and that nothing seems entirely real to me anymore. I want to tell him about the vision, have him pat me on the head in that irritating way and dismiss it with a perfectly logical doctor's explaination. I want to ask him if it's possible that a girl can be born unlovable, or does she just become that way? I want to tell him everything and have him understand. ~ Libba Bray

Everything's borne out of human experience, of course - rejection, humiliation, poverty, whatever. People aren't born bad, no matter how harsh the circumstances. There is a person in there, and that person is not made of ice. ~ Aidan Gillen

I don't know if he'll even look at me, because I can barely look at myself. ~ Gail McHugh

Guilt is different from shame. It has a different weight. Shame just heavies the bones, in a most insinuating way, rousing them to a dense, salty jelly. Guilt, though, is quick and hot and silvery, and it flashes through you with the regular, metered pulse of an electrical current, animating everything inside you to do something, anything, to make the shock stop. ~ Kaitlyn Greenidge

I was born on the same day as Edgar Allan Poe and Dolly Parton: January 19. I am absolutely certain that this affects my writing in some way. ~ Eden Robinson

He'd figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors' backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you'd ever be hassled for going too fast. ~ Christopher McDougall

A prison! heav'ns, I loath the hated name,
Famine's metropolis, the sink of shame,
A nauseous sepulchre, whose craving womb
Hourly inters poor mortals in its tomb;
By ev'ry plague and ev'ry ill possess'd,
Ev'n purgatory itself to thee 's a jest. ~ Tom Brown, Jr.

-


Try to keep everything and keep
standing. In the tall grass,
ten thousand shadows. What's past,
all you've been,
will continue its half-life,
a carbon burn searing its way to heaven
through the twisted core of a pine.
At night, memory will roam your skin.
Your dreams will reveal the squirming world
under the lifted stone.
While you sleep, the sea
floods your house, you wake
to silt, long brown weeds
tangled in the sheets. You wake
in the bog, caked with the froth of peat,
stunted as shore pine,
growing a metre a century.

The bog bruised with colour,
muskeg, hardpan, much.
Matted green sphagnum
thick as buffalo fur.
Sinking into, bouyed
by spongy ground;
walking on water.

In time, night after night,
we'll begin to dream of a langsam sea,
waves in slow motion, thickening to sand.
Drenched with satiety we'll be slow
to rise, a metre a century.

Our brown bed is peat,
born of water, flooded,
burning with the smell of earth. ~ Anne Michaels

Brasi left the room. Two of his men assisted the midwife and the baby was born, the mother was exhausted and went into a deep sleep. Brasi was summoned and Filomena, who had wrapped the newborn child in an extra blanket, extended the bundle to him and said, "If you're the father, take her. My work is finished." Brasi glared at her, malevolent, insanity stamped on his face. "Yes, I'm the father," he said. "But I don't want any of that race to live. Take it down to the basement and throw it into the furnace. ~ Mario Puzo

The future was uncertain, absolutely, and there were many hurdles, twists, and turns to come, but as long as I kept moving forward, one foot in front of the other, the voices of fear and shame, the messages from those who wanted me to believe that I wasn't good enough, would be stilled. ~ Chris Gardner

Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom. ~ Salman Rushdie

I think that there's always room for humour in music. It's something that always takes itself so seriously, which I think is a bit of a shame. ~ Kate Bush

No two individuals, it would seem, could be further apart politically than [Eldridge] Cleaver and [George] Wallace. Cleaver, on the one hand, embodies and articulates the rage that has gripped large segments of the black community in recent years. Born of desperation and despair, this rage has produced burnings and lootings in the ghetto as well as a philosophy of black separatism that represents more a withdrawal from an intimidating and unresponsive white society than a positive program for political action. This rage was also the source of Cleaver's influence. He could ride its powerful currents to fame and notoriety--which the mass media were more than willing to heap upon him--but he could not begin to propose a solution to the injustices that had produced it. Indeed, to assuage the anger and frustration in the black community would have threatened his own base of power.

Wallace, on the other hand, has often been called the embodiment of white racism and reaction. That he is, but, more precisely, his preeminence was a result of the fear which gripped large sections of the white community throughout the country. The Wallace movement grew to frightening proportions not because of anything that Wallace did but because the politically polarized atmosphere in the country called forth the need for a man who would represent the fears and the very worst instincts of millions of people.

While Cleaver and Wallace seem on the surface to be so very different, ~ Bayard Rustin

There is not a young man in our community who would not be willing to travel from here to England to be married right, if he understood things as they are; there is not a young woman in our community, who loves the Gospel and wishes its blessings, that would be married in any other way; they would live unmarried until they could be married as they should be, [even] if they lived until they were as old as Sarah before she had Isaac born to her [see Genesis 17:17]. Many of our brethren have married off their children without taking this into consideration, and thinking it a matter of little importance. I wish we all understood this in the light in which heaven understands it. ~ Brigham Young

Frequently, I have been asked how I got to be this way. How did I, born black in a white country, poor in a society where wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an environment where only large ships and some engines are described favourably by using the female pronoun-how did I get to be Maya Angelou? ~ Maya Angelou

Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can. ~ U.G. Krishnamurti

Haiku Christmas Story

New light in the sky
announces a sacred birth.
Shine brightly young star.

Hallelujah song
carries on a gentle wind,
heralding a king.

Shepherds lift their heads,
not to gaze at a new light
but to hear angels.

"Unto you is born
in the city of David
a Savior for all."

Born on straw at night
under low stable rafters,
Baby Jesus cried.

Sheep and goats and cows
gather 'round a manger bed
to awe at a babe.

Wise men come to see
a child of greater wisdom
and honor divine.

Rare and precious gifts,
gold and myrrh and frankincense,
to offer a king.

Mary and Joseph
huddle snugly together.
They cradle God's son.

On this wise He came,
the Son of God to the earth.
A humble wonder. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

- The local prince had gotten a notion that the girl could spin straw into gold, the dwarf said. Brainless young idiot, but they're all like that. If she could spin straw into gold, why was she living in a hovel? Anyway, Gramps said he'd do her spinning for her in return for part of the gold and her firstborn child. She agreed, but naturally when the baby was born she didn't want to give him up. So Gramps agreed to a guessing game: if she could guess his name, she could keep the baby. Then he let her find out what his name was. She kept the baby and Gramps kept the gold, and everyone went home happy.

- I think I'm beginning to get the idea, Cimorene said. It's not just spinning straw into gold that's a family tradition, is it? It's the whole scheme.

The dwarf nodded sadly.
- Right the first time. Only I can never make it work properly. I can find plenty of girls who're supposed to spin straw into gold, and most of them suggest the guessing game, but I've never had even one who managed to guess my name.

- Oh, dear, said Cimorene.

- I even changed my name legally, so it would be easier, the dwarf said sadly. Herman isn't a difficult name to remember, is it? But no, the silly chits can't do it. So I end up with the baby as well as the gold, and babies eat and cry and need clothes, and the gold runs out, and I have to find another girl to spin gold for, and it happens all over again, and I end up with another baby. It isn't fair! ~ Patricia C. Wrede

You weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you were born with an entire cutlery drawer in there! ~ Jessica Lemmon

Sin is destructive, but heaping additional stones of shame should not be part of the church's response. It suggests that we don't truly know the depths of sin in our own hearts if we can condemn someone else so easily. ~ Heather Davis Nelson

Love is this and love is that; man is born to love; he is only alive when he is in the presence of a woman he loves or should love. ~ Elie Wiesel

What's the fun in standing in the outskirts of love and feeling superior? There's no shame in having got it wrong. Whereas its a shame when you don't even give yourself the chance of getting it right. Better to have loved and lost... ~ Priya Basil

Weight and body oppression is oppressive to everyone. When you live in a society that says that one kind of body is bad and and other is good, those with "good" bodies constantly fear that their bodies will go "bad", and those with "bad" bodies are expected feel shame and do everything they can to have "good" bodies. In the process, we torture our bodies, and do everything from engage in disordered eating to invasive surgery to make ourselves okay. Nobody wins in this kind of struggle. ~ Golda Poretsky

I would say that my ideal of writing history is to give the reader vicarious experience. You're born in one particular century at a particular time, and the only experience you can have directly is of the place you live and the time you live in. History is a way of giving you experience that you would otherwise be cut off from. ~ Edmund S. Morgan