Quotes About Childlessness

Childlessness doesn't make people selfish; selfishness makes people selfish.

Some people can't have babies. It's sad but it's true. Their bodies aren't built for it. Some of those people also can't adopt babies. Just as sad, maybe sadder, and just as true. Their lifestyles aren't built for it. But most people want families. Most people need families.

I can't give birth to my own child; we know that. But it's still embarrassing to me, and that's just how I feel. It's a sensitive subject.

If I told my 16-year-old self that, at 34, I'd have no kids and not be in a movie in America, I wouldn't think I was still successful.

By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn't known back then, which was that none of us could have babies.

I've never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else.

had two reasons. Ned was by himself in this world, except for me, and I didn't want no man and no children spiting him just because he was an orphan. The other reason I never looked at a man, I was barren. An old woman on the place had told me that. I went to her one day and told her how my body act and didn't act. After we had sat down and talked a while, she said one word: "Barren." I went to a doctor and he told me the same thing: "You barren, all right.

Should I one day take an earthly woman to wife, pray for me the following: that she at any rate be sterile. But also ask, should you pray for me, that I never come to have this hypothetical wife.

You have doubtless heard, my dear mother, the misfortune of Madame de Chartres, whose child is born dead. But I would rather have even that, terrible as it is, than be as I am without hope of any children.

I couldn't have children, so that's the bad side. But compared to everything else I have, it's not all that terribly bad. I count my winners rather than my losers.

My rational mind knows I am blessed. So many women - some of whom I've interviewed over the years - endure infertility and childlessness.

I have great sympathy for people that are infertile, but a life is not something you can give away.

You wait 'til you're my age, and wake every morning to gaze on the vast tract of uncreased linen that is the other side of the divan. Try being gallant to that... We shan't even have children, don't forget, to look after us in our old age.

When she thinks back to the long wasted years that she has devoted to her marriage, Frances wonders whether she was in possession of all her faculties. She was letting her life slip by and doing nothing with it. They didn't even have children.

Sometimes I think that in not wanting children, I'm preparing for my old age. I know what I want my old age to look like, more than I know almost anything else: a simple home, a simple life, no one needing me for anything, and not needing anyone the way I do now.

Yes, her childlessness was a fugue in itself, a flight- this was the habitual theme she was trying now to resist- a flight from her proper destiny. Her failure to become a woman, as her mother understood the term.

Long years, and so many of them that, one by one, their hopes for a child began to pack their bags and depart.

Yet humanity could not conceive. It tried and tried, and called mighty wizards from every corner of its earthly kingdom, but no child came. Many mourned, and said that a child was a terrible idea to begin with, ...

He'd sensed the strength she'd called on to haul her sexuality out from under the weight of infertility. In his experience childlessness in women either warped into a dedication to self-hating sexual expertise or formed a subsonic noise of sadness and loss.

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.

I live on my own, happily, and I've never wanted children, but it did occur to me one day that there's part of me in 'Torak' - he's a loner, I'm a loner - as there's part of me in 'Renn,' who's quite waspish. I think, in some senses, 'Torak' is the son I never had.

possibility that she might not have been the sole one to be barren. She was the eldest

Isn't it perfectly possible that Nils and his wife are too depressed to have kids? The prospect of having kids depresses the shit out of me, and I'm neither suicidal nor Norwegian!

I have great sympathy for people that are infertile, but a life is not something you can give away.