Quotes from Call the Midwife

“That's the trouble, I can't forget him. He was everything to me, except mine.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Their devotion showed me there were no versions of love there was only... Love. That it had no equal and that it was worth searching for, even if that search took a lifetime.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Now and then in life, love catches you unawares, illuminating the dark corners of your mind, and filling them with radiance. Once in awhile you are faced with a beauty and a joy that takes your soul, all unprepared, by assault.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“The shell must be broken before the bird can fly.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Was it love of people?' I asked her.
'Of course no,' she snapped sharply. 'How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don't even know? Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it? One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Love doesn't adhere to time and boundaries does it? It just is.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Circumstances bring people together, and take them apart. One cannot keep up with everyone in a lifetime.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“I've loved someone since I was seventeen but I can't have him and I can't give him up. So until I can do that no one else will stand a chance.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Questions, questions – you wear me out with your questions, child. Find out for yourself – we all have to in the end. No one can give you faith. It is a gift from God alone. Seek and ye shall find. Read the Gospels. There is no other way. Do not pester me with your everlasting questions. Go with God, child; just go with God.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Quite suddenly, with blinding insight, the secret of their blissful marriage was revealed to me. She couldn't speak a word of English and he couldn't speak a word of Spanish.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Sister Monica Joan murmured, as though to herself, but loud enough to be heard by all, "How perfectly charming. Old enough to know it all, and young enough to blush. Perfectly charming.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Quite honestly, a baby covered in blood, still slightly blue, eyes screwed up, in the first few minutes after birth, is not an object of beauty.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Now and then in life, love catches you unawares, illuminating the dark corners of your mind, and filling them with radiance. Once in a while you are faced with a beauty and a joy that takes your soul, all unprepared, by assault.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Her religious poetry was surprisingly slender, and as I was eager to know more about her religion, I asked her about this aspect of her poetry. She replied with these lines from Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all Ye know on eath, and all ye need to know'. Do not ask me to immortalise the great Mystery of Life. I am just a humble worker. For beauty, look to the Pslams, to Isaiah, to St. John of the Cross. How could my poor pen scan such verse? For truth, look to the Gospels-- four short accounts of God made Man. There is nothing more to say.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“I have a theory that all human babies are born prematurely. Given the human life span – three score years and ten – to be comparable with other animals of similar longevity, human gestation should be about two years. But the human head is so big by the age of two that no woman could deliver it. So our babies are born prematurely, in a state of utter helplessness.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“The Pill was introduced in the early 1960s and modern woman was born. Women were no longer going to be tied to the cycle of endless babies; they were going to be themselves. With the Pill came what we now call the sexual revolution. Women could, for the first time in history, be like men, and enjoy sex for its own sake. In the late 1950s we had eighty to a hundred deliveries a month on our books. In 1963 the number had dropped to four or five a month. Now that is some social change!”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“I am forced to the conclusion that modern medicine does not know it all.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Her constant phrase, "Go with God", had puzzled me a good deal. Suddenly it became clear. It was a revelation - acceptance. It filled me with joy. Accept life, the world, Spirit, God, call it what you will, and all else will follow.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“I would not have described myself as a committed atheist for whom all spirituality was nonsense, but as an agnostic in whom large areas of doubt and uncertainty resided.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“No one can give you faith. It is a gift from God alone. Seek and ye shall find. Read the Gospels. There is no other way.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“All nuns, by the very fact of their monastic profession, are exceptional people. No ordinary woman could live such a life. There must inevitably be something, or many things, that are outstanding about a nun.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“It did not occur to me at the time that her radiance had a spiritual dimension, owing nothing to the values of the temporal world.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Of course not,” she snapped sharply. “How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don’t even know? Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it? One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Sister Evangelina had plenty of homespun advice to offer her patients: "Where-ere you be, let your wind go free", to which the reply was always chanted: "In Church and Chapel let it rattle".”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“So, like Jane Austen, who in all her writing never recorded a conversation between two men alone, because as a woman she could not know what exclusively male conversation would be like, I cannot record much about the men of Poplar, beyond superficial observation.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“Therefore…‘Sing, my darlings, sing, Before your petals fade, To feed the flowers of another spring.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

“What woman worthy of the name Mother would stand on a high moral platform about selling her body if her child were dying of hunger and exposure? Not I.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from Call the Midwife

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“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quote from The Social Contract

“Sylphid was beginning to play professionally, and she was subbing as second harpist in the orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. She was called pretty regularly, once or twice a week, and she’d also got a job playing at a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties on Friday night. Ira would drive her from the Village up to the restaurant with her harp and then go and pick her and the harp up when she finished. He had the station wagon, and he’d pull up in front of the house and go inside and have to carry it down the stairs. The harp is in its felt cover, and Ira puts one hand on the column and one hand in the sound hole at the back and he lifts it up, lays the harp on a mattress they keep in the station wagon, and drives Sylphid and the harp uptown to the restaurant. At the restaurant he takes the harp out of the car and, big radio star that he is, he carries it inside. At ten-thirty, when the restaurant is finished serving dinner and Sylphid’s ready to come back to the Village, he goes around to pick her up and the whole operation is repeated. Every Friday. He hated the physical imposition that it was—those things weigh about eighty pounds—but he did it. I remember that in the hospital, when he had cracked up, he said to me, ‘She married me to carry her daughter’s harp! That’s why the woman married me! To haul that fucking harp!’ “On those Friday night trips, Ira found he could talk to Sylphid in ways he couldn’t when Eve was around. He’d ask her about being a movie star’s child. He’d say to her, ‘When you were a little girl, when did it dawn on you that something was up, that this wasn’t the way everyone grew up?’ She told him it was when the tour buses went up and down their street in Beverly Hills. She said she never saw her parents’ movies until she was a teenager. Her parents were trying to keep her normal and so they downplayed those movies around the house. Even the rich kid’s life in Beverly Hills with the other movie stars’ kids seemed normal enough until the tour buses stopped in front of her house and she could hear the tour guide saying, ‘This is Carlton Pennington’s house, where he lives with his wife, Eve Frame.’ “She told him about the production that birthday parties were for the movie stars’ kids—clowns, magicians, ponies, puppet shows, and every child attended by a nanny in a white nurse’s uniform. At the dining table, behind every child would be a nanny. The Penningtons had their own screening room and they ran movies. Kids would come over. Fifteen, twenty kids.”
― Philip Roth, quote from I Married a Communist

“I've come to see that competitors are necessary to those who want to get on in the world. Opposition is indispensable to success.”
― Pitigrilli, quote from Cocaine

“You’ll fight, damn it. You’ll not give over this easily. God is not ready for you yet because I am not through with you. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to give me the words I’ve waited on for so long. Telling me you love me on the battlefield as we both lay dying doesn’t count. You’ll give them to me and mean them or so help me I’ll bury you in unconsecrated ground so that you never rest and you’ll be forced to dwell in this keep with me for eternity.”
― Maya Banks, quote from Never Love a Highlander

“It’s encrypted,” Hyden said. “I’m not surprised. Your father wasn’t stupid.” “So can’t you uncrypt it?” Michael asked. “Decrypt. It’s not a coffin,” Hyden said as he plucked at the screen.”
― Lissa Price, quote from Enders

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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