Childlessness Quotes

“We both liked children; we just didn't want any ourselves. There were children everywhere, and we saw no reason to start our own brand. Young couples plunge into parenthood and about half the time they end up with some ghastly problem on their hands. We thought we'd leave that to others.”
― Thomas McGuane

“There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammelled calamity.

Maybe she just doesn't like children.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“People realize that a life that had seemed enjoyable (travel, social life, romance) and fulfilling (work) was actually empty and meaningless. So they urge you to join the child-rearing party: they want you to share the riches, the pleasures, the joys. Or so they claim. I suspect that hey just want to share and spread the misery. (The knowledge that someone is at liberty or has escaped makes the pain of incarceration doubly hard to bear). Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life 'meaning' is the one to which I am most hostile--apart from all the others" (201).”
― Geoff Dyer, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn't see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That's what mothers told her: Oh, you don't know what you're missing; it's spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true--it must be true--but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She'd known too many women who'd vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who'd magically been replaced by their children and their children's desires.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World

“What we, and others, often fail to realise is the depth and reach of our loss: that not only will we never have children, but we will never create our own family. We will never watch them grow up, never throw children's birthday parties, never take that 'first day at school' photo, never teach them to ride a bike. We'll never see them graduate, never see them possibly get married and have their own children. We'll never get a chance to heal the wounds of our own childhood by doing things differently with our children. We'll never be grandmothers and never give the gift of grandchildren to our parents. We'll never be the mother of our partner's children and hold that precious place in their heart. We'll never stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our siblings and watch our children play together. We'll never be part of the community of mothers, never be considered a 'real' woman. And when we die, there is no one to leave our stuff to, and no one to take our lifetime's learnings into the next generation.

If you take the time to think about it all in one go, which is more than most of us are ever likely to do because of the breathtaking amount of pain involved, it's a testament to our strength that we're still standing at all.”
― Jody Day, Living the Life Unexpected: How to find hope, meaning and a fulfilling future without children

“The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“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.”
― Tobsha Learner, Tremble Sensual Fables of the Mystical by Tobsha Learner

“God does not willingly bring affliction or grief to us. He does not delight in causing us to experience pain or heartache. He always has a purpose for the grief He brings or allows to come into our lives. Most often we do not know what that purpose is, but it is enough to know that His infinite wisdom and perfect love have determined that the particular sorrow is best for us. God never wastes pain. He always uses is to accomplish His purpose. And His purpose is for His glory and our good. Therefore, we can trust Him when our hearts are aching or our bodies are racked with pain.”
― Jerry Bridges, Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts

“Wherever they went—Moscow, Tehran, the Syrian coast, Switzerland—a furnished house, villa, or apartment awaited the young couple. And their philosophies of life were the same: "We have only one life!" So take everything life can give, except one thing: the birth of a child. For a child is an idol who sucks dry the juices of your being without any return for your sacrifices, not even ordinary gratitude.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“At the cry of a new born salt is being sprinkle at the wound of a barren woman”
― peter adejimi

“For many of us who are still adjusting to the very real way that our friends becoming mothers often means 'losing' them as friends, yet another announcement can feel like a bell tolling on that friendship. We've heard our friends say to us, 'It's not going to change anything,' and we know that they mean it at the time, but they're probably going to move towards a new circle of friends who are mothers, and that's how it needs to be. And we're not mothers.”
― Jody Day, Living the Life Unexpected: How to find hope, meaning and a fulfilling future without children

“Something she and her husband had in common but rarely discussed was the absence of a desire for children, to fill their home with people besides themselves. It was a silent agreement, felt rather than spoken, and in her experience the soundest agreements were the ones that did not require the reassurances of language. Therefore this line of questioning was the inverse of what she usually fielded, since a childless married woman in her thirties was so often regarded, by men and women alike, as a puzzle or a pity. What's the story here? people would ask, inquests designed to make women like her suspect there was something malformed inside, blinding them to the hideous reality of their choice.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“The judge took into account “the profound despair of a woman unable to give life…” As if a man couldn’t be as deeply affected by the lack of a child, too.”
― Zidrou, The Adoption

“I admit to not being an aficionado of children, having been one and having found my cohort and myself generally despicable. Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Had any children? the doctor asks. I say No.
And close my lips—the other half of the answer.
If this were a party, I'd feel I had to go on,
even if the other person hadn't asked
Why not? Or Are you planning on having any?
They feel free to ask. And almost always, I explain
something about wanting them but not enough,
or how I wish I had two lives: in one of them
I'd have a child by now. But it's no good,
not doing something never sounds as real as doing it. I seem to stand in for reserve,
my life a keeping back, a state of being
not in active service.”
― Nancy Eimers, No Moon

“If you like your evening plans you aren't allowed to regret what led you to them.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, After I Do

“I will never 'get over' not having a family (it's not the flu), but that doesn't mean that I can't build a new life.”
― Jody Day, Living the Life Unexpected: How to find hope, meaning and a fulfilling future without children

“I had a hint of what's to come during the depths of my grief when my then teenage goddaughter walked up to me with a mutual friend's baby on her hip and said, 'I can't wait till I have my own baby!' With a sickening lurch I realised, 'It's all going to happen again one day - watching everyone but me become grandparents.' The vision of this beautiful young woman at the very beginning of her childbearing years was so archetypal, so full of promise and joy, and yet so coloured by my own loss. A bittersweet tear popped out of the corner of my eye and joined my genuine delight in her excitement, as well as my fervent hope that 'her' dreams of a family come true. 'May she never know the taste of these tears,' I prayed.”
― Jody Day, Living the Life Unexpected: How to find hope, meaning and a fulfilling future without children

“Forget about the other girls’ ambitions, Bethany, whatever you think they are. What do you want? “
She stops, and together we look at the wall of red creeper. “If I had a baby I call it Felix. That means happy, right? It would be kind of an ironic name.” I wait for more, thinking: The name I always had in mind was Max. “But I won’t be having a baby.” Me neither. They said I nearly died, there was “no way of saving anything.” Anything: an interesting euphemism. No Max. Not now, not ever.
“But how can you know you’ll never have children? “
“What’s the point, when the world’s fucked? I’d have to be a sadist.” Haresh Modak and the Planetarians would agree with her. They’re singing from the same hymn sheet.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“There is “colossal arrogance“, he maintains, in the assumption that humans will last forever. If one looks at the planet’s life across billions of years, rather than in terms of humankind’s meager history as a dominant species, we will see that our presence on earth has lasted the blink of an eye. “We are the agents of our own destruction - and when we are gone, extinguished by our own heedless quest for expansion, the planet will not mourn us. Indeed, it will have cause to rejoice. Today, the human species stands at the brink of a new mass extinction which will see, if not it’s disappearance, then its extreme marginalization./ for the first time in human history, the destruction - already apparent – is global. In times past, children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the future of the gene pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them. “
Although more conservative and measured than the planetarian on the TV, Modak’s underlying message seems to be that pessimism is the new realism. I do not doubt his projections or his figures or his graphs. But his conclusions depress me.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“You and Meera didn’t have children. I imagine that was a private response.”
“Why create hostages to a future whose shape one could so clearly see? The decision was to avoid grief. For oneself but also for others. “ from habit, I note detailing use of “one “instead of “I “or “we “and store the observation. “The world is too full. But the childless are always punished. It’s a great irony that one gets called selfish for making what is essentially the altruistic choice.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“People who have no children can be hard:
Attain a mail of ice and insolence:”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems

“Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.”
― Saki, The Jesting of Arlington Stringham

“...it is plain that the proportion of celibates was high in the Roman empire and that the fall in the fertility of marriages was going on. It is the childless marriage, the small family system that contemporary writers deplore....'The human harvest was bad,' It was bad in all classes, but the decline was most marked in the upper ranks, the most educated, the most civilized, the potential leaders of the race.”
― Eileen Power, Medieval People