Infant Quotes

“Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!”
― Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

“New mothers are often told that once they've fed, burped, and changed their baby they should leave their baby alone to self-soothe if they cry because all of their needs have been met. One day I hope all new mothers will smile confidently and say, "I gave birth to a baby, not just a digestive system. My baby as a brain that needs to learn trust and a heart that needs love. I will meet all of my baby's needs, emotional, mental, and physical, and I'll respond to every cry because crying is communication, not manipulation.”
― L.R. Knost, Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages

“The child's heart beat: but she was growing in the wrong place inside her extraordinary mother, south of safe...she and her mother were rushed to the hospital, where her mother was operated on by a brisk cheerful diminutive surgeon who told me after the surgery that my wife had been perhaps an hour from death from the pressure of the child growing outside the womb, the mother from the child growing, and the child from growing awry; and so my wife did not die, but our mysterious child did...Not uncommon, an ectopic pregnancy, said the surgeon...Sometimes, continued the surgeon, sometimes people who lose children before they are born continue to imagine the child who has died, and talk about her or him, it's such an utterly human thing to do, it helps deal with the pain, it's healthy within reason, and yes, people say to their other children that they actually do, in a sense, have a sister or brother, or did have a sister or brother, and she or he is elsewhere, has gone ahead, whatever the language of your belief or faith tradition. You could do that. People do that, yes. I have patients who do that, yes...

One summer morning, as I wandered by a river, I remembered an Irish word I learned long ago, and now whenever I think of the daughter I have to wait to meet, I find that word in my mouth: dunnog, little dark one, the shyest and quietest and tiniest of sparrows, the one you never see but sometimes you sense, a flash in the corner of your eye, a sweet sharp note already fading by the time it catches your ear.”
― Brian Doyle, The Wet Engine: Exploring Mad Wild Miracle of Heart

“The next time you see a baby, remember that there is a powerful statistical computer in front of you”
― Albert Costa, The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language

“With regard to things such as independence, mental capabilities, and sexuality, a very old man is nothing but a gigantic infant with white hair and wrinkles.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“When we encourage new parents to 'treasure these moments because they don't last forever' we need to remember to also reassure them that they will survive these moments because they don't last forever.
Parenting is hard, and the struggles can sometimes feel like they overshadow the joys. Knowing that struggling is normal and will pass helps us get through the hard times so we can truly treasure the good ones.”
― L.R. Knost

“My word, he's ugly!' Howl said. 'Chip off the old block.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air

“I can only begin the process of saving myself when I surrender to the reality that I can’t. And what greater place to surrender that reality than to an infant who surrendered Himself to me so that I might surrender myself to Him.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“... the roots of security and resilience are to be found in the sense of being understood by and having the sense of existing in the heart and mind of a loving, caring, attuned and self-processed other, an other with a mind and heart of her own.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain

“A baby is as adorable as a fresh flower and as joyful as a twinkling star.”
― Debasish Mridha

“We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike BEFORE that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“There's no sadder sight than that of a child's coffin.”
― Aaron Dries, The Fallen Boys

“A woman predisposed to be a mother can learn to love any baby, while a mother not so disposed does not even learn to love her own.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

“The moment you clasp an infant to your heart, you realize that nobody is born into a caste.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Gora

“Do Not Dictate a Child through Someone, it Ruins the Child's Experience.”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“Babies have the tendency to make adults talk like babies.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Never upset the person that wipes your bum!”
― Steven Magee

“The observatory management team were advised not to allow an infant to stay at the high altitude observatory by their observatory director and the National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO) health and safety manager. They ignored both of them and allowed the infant to stay at the industrialized research facility. The industrial facility was regarded as health and safety risk to the infant and had infestations of rodents and scorpions. It was regularly sprayed with pesticides by pest control.”
― Steven Magee

“Without being an elephant sycophant, it is relevant to note that an infant elephant is a lieutenant giant.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu, Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1

“An Infant Maestro by Stewart Stafford

Baby as a bag of cats,
Grunting like an Everest climber,
Then screaming as if tortured,
Followed by innocent, cooing smiles.

Drinking milk from a rocket bottle,
Tiny hands move with satisfaction,
Conducting an invisible orchestra,
Sighing in rhythm to his gulps.

Bored stares at the ceiling,
As Baby Mama changes him,
Then eye-rolling slumber,
Floating away in the bassinet.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“All this was in contrast to the idea that a newborn, on the basis of cortical immaturity, is a being who remembers and understands nothing: a person only within the context of the mother’s acknowledgment, blank, a species of human cabbage.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The likelihood of my baby being injured during co-sleeping was, in reality, significantly lower than it would have been had I left her in the hospital cot. In the UK, 90 percent more babies die alone in baskets or cots – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – than they do when they securely, rather than hazardously, co-sleep with their mothers.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“These associations, between childbirth and feminine effacement, and between feminine silencing and violence, would, for the first time, become imprinted on the subconscious in relation to birth, creating, in place of passionate and proud attachment, a terror-based antipathy between mother and child, and between the feminine and its biology.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“While she was running as fast as her tiny feet could carry her, an outstretched leg from behind one of the columns in the hall popped out right in front of her. Before her infantile brain could stop or think to evade it, she fell headfirst onto the stone floor, with only her wrist to break her fall at the last moment.”
― Nick Oliveri, The Conjurer

“There are no people more peaceful than infants.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“American culture really sucks regarding mothers having babies! Europe is so much better.”
― Steven Magee

“Wah!!! Wah!!! Wah!!! Fart!!! Vomit!!! Smile! Naptime!”
― Steven Magee

“How should I know?!”
“Well, you’re the expert!”
“Why, just cause I’m a girl I’m supposed to know every single freaking thing about babies?!” I kicked a fallen bottle of ketchup down the aisle. “I’M NOT HER MOM! I’M NOT EVEN OLD ENOUGH TO BE A MOM!”
― Candice Jarrett, Mortal Tether