Parenting & Family Quote by T. E. Lawrence

Lawrence turns the most basic human alibi - I didn’t ask to be born - into a provocation: what if you did, in some half-mystical, half-psychological way? The line is built to needle. “Fault of birth” borrows the moral language of blame and sin, then snaps it onto biology. He’s not arguing a literal prenatal conspiracy; he’s staging a reversal that forces responsibility onto the supposedly powerless. In a life defined by self-invention, secrecy, and a restless appetite for reinvention, the idea that the child “led our parents on” reads like a dark joke about authorship: we pretend our origin story owns us, but we also script it.

The second image is where the quote really works. “Our unborn children who make our flesh itch” turns desire into a physical irritation, less romantic impulse than bodily summons. Sex becomes a kind of haunting by the future: the not-yet-born pressing on the present, demanding continuation. It’s a strikingly modern way to talk about lineage without sentimentality. Instead of children as legacy or blessing, they’re a force that recruits you, like an obligation you feel under the skin.

Context matters. Lawrence, an archaeologist and wartime operator, lived amid grand narratives - empire, nation, destiny - and distrusted their innocence. Here he miniaturizes that skepticism into the family. Even birth, the story we treat as pure accident or pure miracle, gets recast as a transaction between generations, each blaming the other to dodge the uncomfortable truth: life is inherited, but it also insists.