Childless Quotes

1. "We have nothing left. Orphans. Castaways." She turns to me. "Childless. That is what we are. The unwanted or the un-killed. Weare together only by the wrongs done to us. There is no-one else to worry about us, to fear for our safety, or to give us comfort."
Author: Bill Blais

2. "But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children."
Author: Caitlin Moran

3. "I suddenly had this really mad desire to have an affair with a woman. I was divorced. I was childless. I figured there's got to be one more way to really tick off my mom."
Author: Carol Leifer

4. "The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness)."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

5. "While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial "motherhood penalty". Mothers received only half as many callbacks as their identically qualified childless counterparts."
Author: Cordelia Fine

6. "If there is a substantial difference between a gay couple and a childless heterosexual couple, I'm unable to see it."
Author: Daniel Keys Moran

7. "Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take meUp to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,In the moon that is always rising,Nor that riding to sleepI should hear him fly with the high fieldsAnd wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,Time held me green and dyingThough I sang in my chains like the sea."
Author: Dylan Thomas

8. "No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn't."
Author: Elizabeth Berg

9. "All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

10. "Childlessness doesn't make people selfish; selfishness makes people selfish."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

11. "The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of Abraham the way a man starting a fire shields the flame. When Sarah was about to die childless, the Fear gave her a son. When Abraham was about to slaughter the son, the Fear gave him the ram. He is always shielding us like a guttering wick, Laughter said, because the fire he is trying to start with us is a fire that the whole world will live to warm its hands at. It is a fire in the dark that will light the whole world home."
Author: Frederick Buechner

12. "So my father grew up in an orphanage in Boston. He was then adopted by an elderly childless couple from Maine, who gave him the name of Mitchell. He moved to Maine, and there he met my mother and was married."
Author: George J. Mitchell

13. "Kings built tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the kingdom of Gondor sank into ruin, the line of kings failed, the white tree withered and the rule of Gondor was given over to lesser men."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

14. "Among those who still have enough wisdom not to think fairy-stories are pernicious, the common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connection between the minds of children and fairy-stories, of the same order as the connection between children's bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

15. "Out of all the fathers in the world, I am the most like Mother Theresa. Also, I am childless."
Author: Jarod Kintz

16. "Woolf worried about the childlessness from time to time, and suffered from the imposed anxiety that she was not, unlike her friend Vita Sackville-West, a real woman. I do not know what kind of woman one would have to be to stand unflinchingly in front of The Canon, but I would guess, a real one. There is something sadistic in the whip laid on women to prove themselves as mothers and wives at the same time as making their way as artists. The abnormal effort that can be diverted or divided. We all know the story of Coleridge and the Man from Porlock. What of the woman writer and a whole family of Porlocks?For most of us the dilemma is rhetorical but those women who are driven with consummate energy through a single undeniable channel should be applauded and supported as vigorously as the men who have been setting themselves apart for centuries."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

17. "And women, it turns out, pay a steep economic price for being mothers: according to Shelley Correll, a Stanford sociologist who looks at gender inequities in the labor force, the wage gap between mothers and childless women who are otherwise equally qualified is now greater than the wage gap between women and men generally."
Author: Jennifer Senior

18. "I am politically pro-choice, but personally pro-life. I have my faith but refuse to force it on the world at large - especially this world, so brutal and unjust. I cannot make these wrenching personal life and death decisions for others - nor do I believe they should be made by a church run by childless men."
Author: Julianna Baggott

19. "I am single and childless, but I have lots of friends and I am an aunt to three lovely children."
Author: Kate DiCamillo

20. "For years I'd been awaiting that overriding urge I'd always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers' strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There's a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: "I'm pregnant." I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother's deepest fear.) (27)"
Author: Lionel Shriver

21. "I would not have dreamed back then, could never have imagined, that one day I would be a childless mother too."
Author: Lori Lansens

22. "If you live for your children, they may be smitten down and leave you desolate, or, what is far worse, they may desert you and leave you worse than childless in a cold and unfeeling world."
Author: Matthew Simpson

23. "Tevis being childless meant you felt a little sorry for her, and a bit jealous. Probably the same way she felt about you."
Author: Monica Ali

24. "For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was a series of negatives; not to be unmaried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow."
Author: Naipaul V.S.

25. "And again the news offered no news: On CNN, a rerun of Larry King interviewing the widowed and the suffering. On CNN2, a rerun of Larry King interviewing a fatherless son. On CNN3, a rerun of Flight 11 flying toward the first tower, in slow motion. On CNN4, a rerun of the tower collapsing, in slow motion, and again the towers fell, again people jumped and died. On CNN5, a rerun of Larry King interviewing a motherless daughter, a daughterless father, interviewing the motherless, fatherless, wifeless, husbandless, childless, shameless--disgusted, Bill pressed POWER and beheaded King, exiled CNN, and the world went dark. They sat relieved in the silence and dark. Not much road traffic now, but somewhere in the distant overhead the honk and flap of southbound geese, instinct bound, in vees for victory. The turkey was still on the table; the sides were still out. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are tired come home."
Author: Pearl Abraham

26. "Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn't, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns."
Author: Peggy Orenstein

27. "Eugenie, you're a woman without equal, and no matter how much you annoy the hell out of me and no matter how much I try to get you out of my head—and believe me, both occur regularly—I can't stay away from you. Even if you were barren, I'd take you as my consort in an instant and spend the rest of my life with you — childless, so long as it meant you'd be by my side. I would gladly bring you to my bed with no other thoughts than taking joy from your body. It would be enough."- Dorian"
Author: Richelle Mead

28. "I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper." ("The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi")"
Author: Rikki Ducornet

29. "I usually feel like the role comes to you to sort of illuminate some piece of where you are in your life. I feel like I myself am a single woman and I'm childless - by choice - at this point, and I don't know what will happen."
Author: Sarah Paulson

30. "You, what are you? The brat of lucky parents who were related to a childless king. There is no such thing as royal blood. I believe we are what we make ourselves, and as such, you, Crown Princess, are nothing."
Author: Shannon Hale

31. "Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it supposedly made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, hairy, lonely, bitter and prompted them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts. Supposedly women have gotten all they could out of feminism, are now "equal," and so can, by choice, embrace things we used to see as sexist, like a TV show in which some self-satisfied lunk samples the wares of twenty-five women before rejecting twenty-four and keeping the one he likes best, or like the notion that mothers should have primary responsibility for raising the kids. Postfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting, selfless mother."
Author: Susan Douglas

32. "If we are taken over by craving, no matter who or what is before us, all we can see is how it might satisfy our needs. This kind of thirst contracts our body and mind into a profound trance. We move through the world with a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from enjoying what is in front of us. The color of an autumn leaves or a passage of poetry merely amplifies the feeling that there is a gaping hole in our life. The smile of a child only reminds us that we are painfully childless. We turn away from simple pleasures because our craving compels us to seek more intense stimulation or numbing relief."
Author: Tara Brach

33. "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."
Author: Tobsha Learner

34. "Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity."
Author: Tom Robbins

35. "Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:"
Author: Virginia Woolf

36. "A mother-in-law is better than a single and childless political persona, though."
Author: Vladimir Zhirinovsky

37. "It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;--the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered childless and absolved of mortality--old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons."
Author: William Faulkner

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