I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed.

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.

The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

[Henry] I shrugged. "Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident."

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.

I was born to be sad. I was born to suffer.

To be born with nothing was grim. But to be born with everything, then to lose it, was far more cruel.

Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame.

Birth was the death of him.

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

I went to school like other children until I was about 11 or 12 years of age, when the greatest misfortune of my life occurred, namely — the death of my mother, peace to her, she was a good mother to me; after she died my father broke up his home and went to lodgings; unfortunately for me he married his landlady; henceforth I never had one moment's comfort, she having children of her own, and I not being so handsome as they, together with my deformity, she was the means of making my life a perfect misery; lame and deformed as I was, I ran, or rather walked away from home two or three times, but suppose father had some spark of parental feeling left, so he induced me to return home again.

The very remembrance of my former misfortune proves a new one to me.