"Stillborn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... births," admitted the publisher. "Hasty births, premature births, secret births, morganatic births, illegitimate births, and every variety of infelicitous intrusion upon your planet. The rash are born too early, the cautious too late; some even repent on the very brink of birth and elect to be stillborn. But in the majority of cases birth is the outcome of mature deliberation; a contract entered into with a full sense of the responsibilities ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... rough-hewn, his rhyme incorrigibly lewd, and his numbers perpetually harsh and ill-sounding. The little talent which he has, is fancy. He sometimes labours with a thought; but, with the pudder he makes to bring it into the world, 'tis commonly stillborn; so that, for want of learning and elocution, he will never be able to express any thing ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... reddish-bearded, soft-speaking man who owned the waggons as English, even though he had called himself by a Dutch name. The child of three years was his. And his had been the dead body of the woman lying on the waggon-bed, covered with a new white sheet, with a stillborn boy baby lying on ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... might not be without blame in her demeanour which was not troubled by any strict rule. Or did it seem to the King a token of the divine displeasure against this marriage also, that Anne Boleyn in her second confinement brought a stillborn son into the world? It has been always said that the lively interest she took in the progress of the outspoken Protestantism, whose champions were almost all her personal friends, contributed most to her fall. For the house from which she sprung she certainly in this respect went ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... public did not come and the book would not sell, facts which a wicked wag of the period ridiculed, by inserting the following announcement in the column of births of one of the newspapers: "Yesterday, at his house in Queen Anne Street, Dr. Busby of a stillborn Lucretius." ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... which he saw for the first time. It was a southern face, finely moulded, dark and passionate, full-lipped, yet wide of brow, with a generous breadth between the eyes. Seldom had he seen a woman more beautiful; and he stood silent, the words he had been about to speak dying stillborn on his lips. ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... give birth to a healthy child, even though she still has the disease in latent form herself. Still another may have a miscarriage or two and then bear one or two healthy children, only to have the last child, years after her infection, be stillborn and syphilitic. The series of abortions, followed by stillborn or syphilitic children, and finally by healthy ones, is only the general and by no means the ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... matrons who accompanied her gave out with a somewhat suspicious persistency, its ostensible object was to visit the Mount of Purification, and there by fastings and solitude to purge herself of the sin of having given birth to a stillborn child. For amongst savage peoples such an accident is apt to be looked upon as little short of a crime, or, at the least, as indicating that the woman concerned is the object of the indignation of spirits who need to be appeased. To this Mount, Noma went, ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... messige, my friens, t' other day, To tell you I'd nothin' pertickler to say: 'T wuz the day our new nation gut kin' o' stillborn, So't wuz my pleasant dooty t' acknowledge the corn, An' I see clearly then, ef I didn't before, Thet the augur in inauguration means bore. I needn't tell you thet my messige wuz written To diffuse correc' notions in France an' Gret Britten, An' agin to impress ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... the revival of Greek humanities, really existed, as I have repeatedly suggested wherever, during the mediaeval centuries, the civilization of which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were big was not, by the pressure of feudalism and monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn. Low as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and much as she borrowed for a long while from the more precocious northern nations, especially France and Provence; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous advantage in the fact that her populations ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... understand each other in the light of common needs and their satisfaction. There's the seed; water it with the dew of common poverty and you may have one Britain instead of a round dozen, and a League of Men to succeed a stillborn League of Nations. Courage, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... was dead and buried? His physical life was but as an embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we are for the most part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as regards that life which every age and country has recognized as higher and truer than the one of which we are now sentient. As the life of the race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than that of the individual, ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... eyes of the outlaws swept swiftly over the cattleman. Had he shown any sign of indecision, they would have taken a chance and shot it out. But he was so easily master of himself that the impulse to "draw" died stillborn. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... As authorities have pointed out in all these books, the jails, hospitals for the insane, poorhouses and houses of prostitution are filled with the children born of such parents, while an astounding number of their children are either stillborn or ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... six-and-twenty. She was suffering from a frightful disease. The disappearance from her system of the calcareous salts had led to a softening of the osseous framework, the slow destruction of her bones. Three years previously, after the advent of a stillborn child, she had felt vague pains in the spinal column. And then, little by little, her bones had rarefied and lost shape, the vertebrae had sunk, the bones of the pelvis had flattened, and those of the arms and legs had contracted. Thus shrunken, melting ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... majesty of the law exist nowhere, except in words. Of the three thousand decrees given birth to by the Constituent Assembly, the most lauded, those the best set off by a philosophic baptism, form a mass of stillborn abortions of which France is the burying-ground. That which really subsists underneath the false appearances of right, proclaimed and sworn to over and over again, is, on the one hand, an oppression of the upper and cultivated ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that was in control of the Government at Washington, and that he had so faithfully served in Indiana. As respects slavery, he probably would have said with Mr. Douglas that he did not care whether it was voted up or voted down. But his effort fell stillborn and dead. Dr. John H. Stringfellow was an old Whig, and so also were many of the Pro-slavery leaders, and they would not hear to it that there should be any parties known save the Pro-slavery and Free State parties. The Free State men were equally averse to making any division in their own ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... cousin, Reginald Stratton, had been drowned in Finland, and his father had only survived the shock of his death a fortnight; his sister, Arthur Mason's first wife, had died in giving birth to a stillborn child the year before, and my father found himself suddenly the owner of all that large stretch of developing downland and building land which old Reginald had bought between Shaddock and Golding on the south and West ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells |
