I wished I had been born early enough to have been called a Little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love.
But our bird knew not of the free blue air,
He had lived in his cage, and his home was there :
No flight had he in the green wood flown —
He pined not for freedom he never had known!
If he had lived amid leaf and bough
It had been cruel to fetter him now;
For I have seen a poor bird die,
And all for love of his native sky.
All of us wish we had an Alice. I wish I had an Alice.
I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different [nonautistic] child instead.
"I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment…"
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
As for "wattle and daub" I could wish that it had never been invented.
I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. The turkey is a much more respectable bird.
A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.
Polly saw the point. Would she wish not to have been born? Unhappy as she was, she could not say that. Even when she had wished to die, she had not wished never to have been born. Nobody alive could do that.