It is right that I should pick my words most carefully, and meditate over every comma, because I am describing miracles too great for careless utterance.

If I had died after my first breath, my history would still be worth recording.

For before I could lie on my mother's breast, the earth had to be prepared, and the stars had to take their places; a million races had to die, testing the laws of life; and a boy and girl had to be bound for life to watch together for my coming.

I was millions of years on the way, and I came through the seas of chance, over the fiery mountain of law, by the zigzag path of human possibility.

Multitudes were pushed back into the abyss of non-existence, that I should have way to creep into being.
And at the last, when I stood at the gate of life, a weazen-faced fishwife, who had not wit enough to support herself, came near shutting me out.
Such creatures of accident are we, liable to a thousand deaths before we are born.