Mother Quotes

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

No one understands my ills, nor the terror that fills my breast, who does not know the heart of a mother.

I like how Mother Teresa put it: "Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile." If you approach life this way, always looking for ways to build instead of to tear down, you'll be amazed at how much happiness you can give to others and find for yourself

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

Careful?! Was my mother careful when she stabbed me in the heart with a coat hanger while I was still in womb?

I want to turn the whole thing upside down I'll find the things they say just can't be found I'll share the love I find with everyone We'll sing and dance to Mother Nature's song I don't want this feeling to go away.

If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.

my mother never saw the irony of calling me a "son of a bitch

Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Others may decieve you - you decide what's good. You decide alone, but no one is alone. People make mistakes. Fathers, mothers, people make mistakes, holding to their own, thinking they're alone. Honor their mistakes. Fight for their mistakes. Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what's right. You decide what's good.

Such was the love of this grandson for his grandmother that two years after the death of his mother, when she herself fell gravely ill, he vowed to her that someday he would try to tell the world her life story. 'But why?' she asked humbly. 'I'm no one, just a girl from the coast' 'But you are everyone, Grandma,' the young Pramoedya told her. 'You are all the people who have ever had to fight to make this life their own.

My first husband, yes, I eloped with him from Hungary against my mother's wishes.

What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best after all.

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, is more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.

There was never a great man who had not a great mother.

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.

Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

(24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer.

Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.

Well,’ you may ask, ‘how may I know when I am in love?’ . . . George Q. Morris [who later became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, gave this reply]: ‘My mother once said that if you meet a girl in whose presence you feel a desire to achieve, who inspires you to do your best, and to make the most of yourself, such a young woman is worthy of your love and is awakening love in your heart.

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.

We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.

It was no great tragedy being Judy Garland's daughter. I had tremendously interesting childhood years - except they had little to do with being a child.

I was baptized alongside my mother when I was 8 years old. Since then, I have tried to walk a Christian life. And now that I'm getting older, I realized that I'm walking even closer with my God.

Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother's home.

When you’re working with Army and Marine Corps units, you immediately notice a difference. The Army is pretty tough, but their performance can depend on the individual unit. Some are excellent, filled with hoorah and first-class warriors. A few are absolutely horrible; most are somewhere in between. In my experience, Marines are gung ho no matter what. They will all fight to the death. Every one of them just wants to get out there and kill. They are bad-ass, hard-charging mothers.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, 'Get the hell off my property.'

A father's suspicion...' she began. Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.' ~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon

Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.

Heroes are people who face down their fears. It is that simple. A child afraid of the dark who one day blows out the candle; a women terrified of the pain of childbirth who says, 'It is time to become a mother'. Heroism does not always live on the battlefield.

I like all the angels around because they protect me and my daughter. I mean, her Dad's an angel.

Children are the anchors of a mother's life.

When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.

Nobody loves me but my mother, And she could be jivin' too.

My mother was a continual source of wisdom and great advice...she taught me that there is always a way around a problem-you've just got to find it. Keep trying doors; one will eventually open. She also taught me to accept failure as part and parcel of life. It's not the opposite of success; it's an integral part of success. I talk a lot about learning to become fearless in your approach to life. But fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's the mastery of fear. It's all about getting up one more time than you fall down.

Such a woman is called "Mother's FRIEND" always ready to give judicious Parental advice and living vicariously on the experience of others

Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.

When you give of yourself something new comes in to being... the world expands, a bit of goodness is brought forth and a small miracle occurs. You must never underestimate this miracle. Too many good people think they have to become Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer, or even Santa Claus, and perform great acts if they are to be givers. They don't see the simple openings of the heart that can be practiced anywhere with almost anyone.

I saw six men kicking and punching the mother-in-law. My neighbour said 'Are you going to help?' I said 'No, six should be enough.'

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't; I didn't know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn't want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I'd made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that.

8.45 a.m. My mother is in the hospital grounds smoking a cigarette. She is looking old and haggard. All the debauchery is catching up with her.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

My parents kept the best aspects of the Asian culture, and they Americanized the family. My mother was a great example for me. She was a working mother with a good career.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother's age.

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.

A mother's nurturing love arouses in children, from their earliest days on earth, an awakening of the memories of love and goodness they experience in their premortal existence, Because our mothers love us, we learn, or more accurately remember, that God also loves us

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.

The challenges I have faced—among them material poverty, chronic illness, and being raised by a single mother—are not uncommon, but neither have they kept me from uncommon achievements.

I'm sorry, Mother. It's just that five days of flying with these characters has made me crawl right to the edge of sanity.' 'I fell over the edge.' Karen said. 'I jumped,' Walter added, 'And I can't seem to climb back up.

Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.

The burden God places on each of us is to become who we are meant to be. We are most fully ourselves when Christ most fully lives in us and through us. The mother shines brightest with her child in her arms, the father when he forgives his wandering son, and the artist when he or she is drawing attention to grace, by showing the pinprick of light overcoming the darkness in the painting, or the story, or the song. The world knows darkness. Christ came into the world to show us light. I have seen it, have been blinded by it, invaded by it. I will tell its story.

There is no doubt that the princess did become a queen—-not only on the screen. One of the most loved, one of the most skillful, one of the most intelligent, one of the most sensitive, charming actresses—-and friends, in my life—-but also in the later stages of her life, the UNICEF ambassador to the children of the world. The generosity, sensitivity, the nobility of her service to the children of the world and the mothers of the world will never be forgotten.

My mother went into the Peace Corps when she was sixtyeight. My one sister is a motorcycle freak, my other sister is a Holy Roller evangelist and my brother is running for President. I’m the only sane one in the family.

Sometimes being a good mother gets in the way of being a good person.

My mother told me I was dancing before I was born. She could feel my toes tapping wildly inside her for months.

I can always tell when the mother in law's coming to stay; the mice throw themselves on the traps.

Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed.

I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was 'the man goes on top and the woman underneath.' For three years my husband and I slept in bunk beds.

Being a good mother does not call for the same qualities as being a good housewife; a dedication to keeping children clean and tidy may override an interest in their separate development as individuals.

I told my kids I just want three words on my tombstone, if I have one. I'll probably be cremated. One is "woman." I'm very comfortable in that role. I've loved being a woman, I've loved being a mother, I've loved being a grandmother. I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That's me.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Call me All-American, but I love Ham and Cheese sandwiches. And not just any old ham and cheese sandwich... My mother's is the best. I've tried many times to make these sandwiches on my own, but it's never the same.

Mother can beat me all she wants, but I haven’t let her take away my will to somehow survive.

Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.

If I had a choice of educating my daughters or my sons because of opportunity constraints, I would choose to educate my daughters.

In many ways we are all sons and daughters of ancient Greece.

Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.

There are things coming from me that I felt I wanted to talk about. My search for my own blend of spirituality, my acknowledgement of my sexuality, my being the single mother of a young man.

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

Family: A social unit where the father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the mother with closet space.

My mother was against me being an actress - until I introduced her to Frank Sinatra.

I do not believe in god because I do not believe in Mother Goose.

Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she's entirely right about that!

David what your mother did to you was wrong. Verry wrong.No child deserves to be treated like that. She's sick.

Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had, Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism... to ward off threats to her own security and influence.

You must be ready to give up everything, not only material attachments but also human attachments - father, mother, wife, children - everything that you have. But the one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self.

I blame my mother for nothing, but forgive her for everything.

I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.

I owe a lot to my parents, especially by mother and my father.

Upon the shoulders of you mothers rests; in a great measure, the responsibility of correctly developing the mental and moral powers of the rising generation...I have often said it is the mother who forms the mind of the child. Take men anywhere, at sea, sinking with their ship, dying in battle, lying down in death almost under any circumstances, and the last thing they think if, the last word they say is "mother." Such is the influence of woman.

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.

If necessity is the mother of invention, discontent is the father of progress.

The mother-daughter relationship is the most complex.

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards.

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What's the buzz on the street with the kids? She's going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren't into Kiss. But they've all been told that it's the greatest show on Earth.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

The gentleman had also a young daughter, of rare goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world.

I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love.

There is no way to be a perfect mother, and a million ways to be a good one.

When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

What does the truth matter? Haven't we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!

(mother)" She used to tell me to get my nose out of my book and go get some fresh air.

If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before.

Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster.

One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him.

Where there is a mother in the home, matters go well.

Always a godmother, never a mother. That sucks. I've got to get me one of those little accessories.

The boy and girl going hand in hand through a meadow; the mother washing her baby; the sweet simple things in life. We have almost lost track of them. On the one side, we over-intellectualize everything; on the other hand, we are over-mechanized. We can understand the danger of the atomic bomb, but the danger of our misunderstanding the meaning of life is much more serious.

The inspiration came suddenly again to surrender to the Mother. It was quite unexpected: And so somehow I made a surrender to the Mother. Then I had an experience of overwhelming love. Waves of love sort of flowed into me.

The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

I think maintaining relationships with my friends, my mother, my manager, they're all important.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

The race of gods and men is one, and from one mother we both draw our breath. Yet all the difference in our power holds us apart, so that man is nothing, but the brazen floor of heaven is eternally unshakable.

My mother-in-law had a pain beneath her left breast. Turned out to be a trick knee.

When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him.

Never marry a man who hates his mother because he'll end up hating you.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.

As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.

If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!

The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best.

As a girl my temper often got out of bounds. But one day when I became angry at a friend over some trivial matter, my mother said to me, Elizabeth, anyone who angers you conquers you.

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

Motherhood has relaxed me in many ways. You learn to deal with crisis. I've become a juggler, I suppose. It's all a big circus, and nobody who knows me believes I can manage, but sometimes I do.

People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.

All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women? In some ways we're as committed to the old madonna-whore dichotomy as ever. And the madonna stays home, feeding the baby behind the blinds, a vestige of those days when for a lady to venture out was a flagrant act of public exposure.

My wife is the kind of girl who will not go anywhere without her mother, and her mother will go anywhere.

God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.

The only ones who like Milton Berle are his mother - and the public.

If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you.

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.

Every day my mother had tea. My dad has his ritual cigar. They had their evening cocktail. Those rituals were done nicely, with flair and feeling.

I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.

As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about.

When you're young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you're too young to understand, and when she's old you shield her because she's too old to understand - or to have any more understanding inflicted upon her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don't want to know.

Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn't interest you, don't do it - I would have made a terrible mother.

Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

The Vatican is against surrogate mothers. Good thing they didn't have that rule when Jesus was born.

The future is religion and commerce, aphrodisiac and Benzedrine, a mother of mysterious comfort and a mistress of familiar ravishments ever on the verge of embracing or destroying us.

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.

To the outside world, of course, this job is a cinch: 9 to 3, five days a week, two months' summer vacation with pay, all legal holidays, prestige and respect. My mother, for example, has the pleasant notion that my day consists of nodding graciously to the rustle of starched curtsies and a chorus of respectful voices bidding me good morning.

I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.

Night is the mother of thoughts.

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.

Silence is become his mother tongue.

Necessity, the mother of invention.

I hadn’t had a mother since I was two, and from then until seven I had believed God was someone who had run off with her and was living with her somewhere else... (God took your mother, dear, because he needed her more than you do) which had never endeared him to me

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

We must work together to save and strengthen Social Security not just for my father's generation but also for my daughters' generation.

I get whatever placidity I have from my father. But my mother taught me how to take it on the chin.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatedly) 'Ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Her mother was a Rutherford. The family came over in the ark, and were connected by marriage with Henry the VIII. On her father's side they date back further than Adam. On the topmost branches of her family tree there's a superior breed of monkeys with very fine silky hair and extra long tails.

A child's hand in yours - what tenderness and power it arouses. You are instantly the very touchstone of wisdom and strength.

An Editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an Editor.

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! . It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it. Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.

A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.

Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, There's no place like home.

Air pollution is turning Mother Nature prematurely gray.

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.

A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.

You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.

Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions

Actors worry about bad breath, weight, receding hairlines and why their leading lady looks like their daughter.

Milton calls the university A stony-hearted step-mother.

My mother used to say, 'He who angers you, conquers you!' But my mother was a saint.

My mother used to tell me about vibrations. I didn't really understand too much of what that meant when I was just a boy. To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death.

Anyone who doesn't miss the past never had a mother.

But I was very, very unhappy because my mother was very charming and generous, but to me, very dominating.

My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

Pain cannot be ignored. However, it can be endured. When necessary, a great deal of pain can be endured. Just ask my mother.

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.

The bravest battle that ever was fought; Shall I tell you where and when? On the maps of the world you will find it not; It was fought by the mothers of men.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don't pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that "nice girls don't." He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue-but only in a certain section of society.

My mother took my picture to a model agency and the rest is history.

I'm starting to get older, and began to think about mortality a little more. My mother died in 2003 and that was a big shock. When your parents start to die off, that's going to be a revelation. So for me, this album - although it might sound quite cheery - is really talking about death.

A guilty conscience is the mother of invention.

Any mother could perform the jobs of several air-traffic controllers with ease.

You know, that's the only good thing about divorce; you get to sleep with your mother.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea.

I was born because my mother needed a fourth for meals.

Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy - the mother

Yeah, I definitely wanted to do a kids' movie because I have a kid. I want to do things that my daughter can see soon - when she is old enough to know what a movie is.

I had to put my kid before my career and all the money I was making. I decided to do the right thing. I was dying inside. If I didn't have my daughter, I would be dead right now, for sure.

I'll simply say here that I was born Beatrice Gladys Lillie at an extremely tender age because my mother needed a fourth at meals.

I was thinking (when he hit his 500th home run) about my mother and dad, about all the people in the Chicago Cubs organization that helped me and about the wonderful Chicago fans who have come out all these years to cheer me on. They've been a great inspiration to me.

I still have my bad days when I think I'm not getting everything I deserve. But those pass quickly once my Mother gets on the phone and says, 'listen, we used to eat rocks and walk 80 miles a day to school.

My mother liked Jim Reeves. I hated his records. He was unbearable.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.

Growing up my mother played Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole in the house regularly.

The mother is not dying exactly, but has reached a point in life where death is a familiar on the staircase.

My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands.

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

Obedience is the mother of success and is wedded to safety.

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

The legacy of women's war work is our present post-industrial employment structure. It was the war that created the demand for a technologically advanced, de-skilled, low-paid, non-unionized female workforce and paved the way for making part-time work the norm for married women now. A generation later, it was the daughters of wartime women workers who completed their mothers' campaign for equal pay.

I'm a '70s mom, and my daughter is a '90s mom. I know a lot of women my age who are real computer freaks.

When my mother had to get dinner for 8 she'd just make enough for 16 and only serve half.

Ignorance is the mother of admiration

A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics.

Mothers and daughters can stay very connected during teenage years. In the middle of your life, you can become very alone. Even though you're connected deeply to other family members, lovers, husbands, friends.

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

Who ran to help me when I fell, And would some pretty story tell, Or kiss the place to make it well? My mother

When I get a very generous introduction like that I explain that I'm emotionally moved, but on the other hand I'm Irish and the Irish are very emotionally moved. My mother is Irish and she cries during beer commercials.

The watchful mother tarries nigh, though sleep has closed her infants eyes.

The mother of revolution and crime is poverty

My mother buried three husbands - and two of them were only napping.

People are disturbed enough by serial killers, but the whole notion of female violence, particularly maternal violence - the idea of mothers who kill - really unnerves people.

Badly off as the men...were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives.

I demand for the unmarried mother, as a sacred channel of life, the same reverence and respect as for the married mother; for Maternity is a cosmic thing and once it has come to pass, our conversation must not be permitted to blaspheme it.

If my mom came here today, she'd probably join this red-hat brigade. My mother got my sense of humor, even when I was a kid. I would just do things that tickled my fancy in the moment, and she would ask me who I was entertaining. I'd say, 'Well, me.' And she would tell me that nobody knew that and they thought I was psychotic. Well, I don't ever want people to think I'm psychotic, but I can't help myself from doing these things.

I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.

My mother always told me I wouldn't amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said, "Just wait."

My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive.

Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true — but it's father is creativity, and knowledge is the midwife.

I had a mother who taught me there is no such thing as failure. It is just a temporary postponement of success.

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.

The young man who wants to marry happily should pick out a good mother and marry one of her daughters - any one will do.

The father of every good work is discontent, and its mother is diligence.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Poverty is the step-mother of genius.

No matter how old we become, we can still call them 'Holy Mother' and 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them.

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

The death of my daughter is a subject I talk about briefly because there is nothing more tragic.

My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.

I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.

Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of [Junior's] speech. Not an insignificant "have went" nor an infinitesimal "I seen" ever escaped the keen ears of his eldest sister, who immediately corrected him. Mother sometimes thought Katherine a little severe when, in the interest of proper speaking, she would stop him in the midst of an exciting account of a home-run. There were times, thought Mother, when the spirit of the thing was so much more important than the flesh in which it was clothed.

Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father.

Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?

Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. "The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize." "Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.

The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.

If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

Diligence is the mother of good luck.

To me, he's a hero, ... He's not polite. He's not someone you want to take home to meet your mother, necessarily. This is a guy in search of truth. Incidentally, that truth one day could save your life or the life of someone you love. That's a heroic thing

When you're growing up your mother says, "Wear rubbers or you'll catch cold." When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It's something like that.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

I wasn't actually trained by my mother, she said she never taught me but she was a great singer herself and I can't remember when I didn't listen to her sing and imitate her.

Fear is the mother of foresight

Back of every achievement is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

In a husband there is only a man; in a married woman there is a man, a father, and mother, and a woman.

Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.

It takes a heap o' children to make a home that's true,And home can be a palace grand, or just a plain, old shoe;But if it has a mother dear, and a good old dad or two,Why, that's the sort of good old home for good old me and you.

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

Do you think your mother and I should have lived comfortably so long together, if ever we had been married? Baggage!

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged.

I've never hit a woman in my life. Not even my own mother.

The mother has to have enough food in order to produce enough milk in order to breast feed, but she has to know that she should breast feed. That's an education issue.

My mother is such a lousy cook that Thanksgiving at her house is a time of sorrow.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

A man loves his sweetheart the most, his wife the best, but his mother the longest.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

The first person I learned I could make happy with laughter was my mother, whom I idolize. It was a powerful thing to realize. I knew I had found my life's work.

Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.

When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!

I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing 'Maria' from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.

Okay, using the dreaded middle name is not the best way to forge a bond.

Fear is the father of courage and the mother of safety.