“Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.”

“I watched my friend Eleanor give birth," she said. "Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months.”

“I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, Mother, what was war?”

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

“When the number of children goes over one, God becomes miserly in granting intelligence; he takes it from the living child and gives it to the child to be born.”

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”