Why was I born with such contemporaries?

I have to face the fact that I and my high-minded comrades, both those in that chimerical Communist Party in Southern Rhodesia, and many I have met since ... were of the stuff of those murderers with a clear conscience. We were lucky, that's all.

Baby, I was born this way.

We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers.

Some are born posthumously.

The ancestors are generally only a caricature of the contemporaries, and the descendants a caricature of the ancestors. p. 127

Posterity is grateful if our contemporaries are not.

I was born not just because I had conceived a notion to stay, but because in between my coming and going the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck. I prayed for laughter, a life without hunger. I was answered with paradoxes. It remains an enigma how it came to be that I was born smiling.

I, who have no sisters or brothers, look with some degree of innocent envy on those who may be said to be born to friends.

When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

One is born either to go with or to go against.

Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred.

In the very lowest class it is well to be bred up amid those scenes wherein our future is cast ; nothing ever supplies the place of those early associations — nothing ever knits the heart to the place of its birth like the remembrances of childhood — nothing can give the entire knowledge of a people, but having been brought up among them.

I was born wise. Street-wise, people-wise, self-wise. This wisdom was my birthright. I was also born old. And illegitimate. But the two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.