“I remember when you’ll be a month old, and I’ll stumble out of bed to give you your 2:00 a.m. feeding.”

“I am giving birth. I am midwife to myself. Now is a new life full of possibilities. I must be strong like a child.”

“For that half-hour in the hospital delivery room I was intimate with immensity, for that half-minute before birth I held her hands and for that duration we three were undivided, I felt the blood of her pulse as we gripped hands, felt her blood beat in the rhythm that reached into the baby as she slipped into the doctor’s hands, and for a few days we touched that immensity, we saw through her eyes to an immense intimacy, saw through to where she had come from, I felt important being next to her, and the feeling lasted when we entered our car for the drive home, thinking to myself that we weren’t to be trusted with our baby, the feeling lasting while I measured us against the landscape, the February rain, the pewter sky, and then the rain freezing to the roadway, the warmth of the interior of the car with its unbreakable transparent sky dome and doors, until the car spun on the ice in the lane and twirled so that I could take an hour to describe how I threw up my hands in anguish as the baby slipped from her arms and whipped into the face of her mother reflected in the glass door, and she caught the baby back into her arms as the car glided to a stop in its usual place at the end of the drive, and nothing but silence and a few drops of blood at a nostril suggested that we would now be intimate with the immensities of death (“Interim”)”

“He shook his head, trying to shake the convoluted thoughts loose. He couldn’t worry about it right now. Not about how Thomas felt, or how Quinn did, or even how he, himself did. They were where they were, and there were things to do. First and foremost, there was a baby to deliver.”

“Every baby is born with a new world in her heart, full of love, hope, dreams and endless possibilities.”

“Like it or not, there are people who are capable to love genuinely and kill brutally. The amazing thing about that, few of those could even sleep well like babies in the night.”

“A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don’t compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn’t know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.”

“Rockabye Baby, in the treetopDont you know a treetopis no safe place to rock?And who put you up there,and your cradle too?Baby,I think someone down herehas got it in for you!”