Mothers

I… have a cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerilla war we never understood. ~~ Joan Didion

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular. ~~ Robert Frost

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. ~~ Florida Scott-Maxwell

Even if I say my mother was mean, I still love her and anyhow she wasn't THAT man. I exaggerate everything I fear. ~~ Anne Sexton [to her daughter]

While my mother believes in the Golden Rule, she also advocates a second maxim, which she terms her Iron Rule: "Don't do for others what they wouldn't take the trouble to do for themselves. ~~ Mrs. D. Fulton

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. ~~ Dame Edna Everage

Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups. ~~ Cathy Guisewite

Mother -- that was the bank in which we deposited all our hurts and worries. ~~ DeWitt Talmage

[On motherhood:] Life is the first gift, love is the second, understanding the third. ~~ Marge Piercy

You only have one Mom, and you should take care of her. ~~ Sean [age 12]

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own. ~~ Alice Walker (See "Said Who")

ost mothers are instinctive philosophers. ~~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jivin', too. ~~ B. B. King

Men are what their mothers made them. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers. ~~ Audre Lorde

[On motherhood:] I remember leaving the hospital… thinking, "Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this. [We're] just amateurs. ~~ Anne Tyler

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

If Mom says "no," she means it. If Dad says "no," it means maybe. ~~ Joseph [age 13]

A good father is a little bit of a mother. ~~ Lee Salk

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. ~~ Erich Fromm

No matter what I do, my mom can always tell when I'm lying. ~~ Jamie [age 16]

On Mothers Day, there are no grown children. Everybody goes to Mom's. ~~ Teresa Bloomingdale

Mama says stupid is as stupid does. ~~ Forrest Gump [film, 1994]

Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set in prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins. ~~ Erma Bombeck

If you've ever had a mother, if she's given you and meant to you all the things you care for most, you never get over it. ~~ Anne Douglas Sedgwick

The job description of mother is clearly in need of revision. As it stands, the shifts are 24 hours, for a period of approximately 1,825 consecutive days. The benefits are sorely in need of amendment: no vacations, no sick leave, no lunch hours, no breaks. Moreover, it is the only unpaid position I know of that can result in arrest if you fail to show up for work. ~~ Mary Kay Blakely

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse. ~~ Rebecca West

There's only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it. ~~ Proverb

I cannot forget my mother. Though not as sturdy as others, she is my bridge. When I needed to get across, she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely. ~~ Renita Weems

[Letter to President Ronald Reagan:] To the best of my knowledge there has been no child in space. I would like to learn about being weightless, and I'd like to get away from my mother's cooking. ~~ Jonathan Adashek [age 12]

A Mother's hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,
Ripe on a plate. And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you. ~~ Phyllis McGinley

Pregnancy doubled her, birth halved her, and motherhood turned her into Everywoman. ~~ Erica Jong

I want to lean into her [my mother] the way wheat leans into the wind. ~~ Louise Erdich

When your mom is mad at your dad, don't let her brush your hair. ~~ Morgan [age 11]

I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it. ~~ Rose Kennedy

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good looking, good tempered, well groomed, and unaggressive. ~~ Leslie M. McIntyre

treetalk and windsong are
the language of my mother
her music does not leave me. ~~ Barbara Mahone

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. ~~ Oprah Winfrey

My mother is a poem I'll never be able to write though everything I write is a poem to my mother. ~~ Sharon Doubiago

I have always felt that too much time was given before birth, which is spent learning things like how to breathe in and out with your husband (I had my baby when they gave you a shot in the hip and you didn't wake up until the kid was ready to start school), and not enough time given to how to mother after the baby is born. ~~ Erma Bombeck

In all my efforts to learn to read, my mother shared fully my ambition and sympathized with me and aided me in every way she could. If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother. ~~ Booker T. Washington

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 troubles thicken 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. ~~ Washington Irving

The story of a mother's life: Trapped between a scream and a hug. ~~ Cathy Guisewite

Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. ~~ Saul Alinsky

If evolution really works, how come mothers still have only two hands? ~~ Ed Dussault

The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two children. ~~ Paul Ehrlich

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. ~~ Jane Seymour

My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one. ~~ Groucho Marx

Integral to being emotionally healthy is to have a mother who has the ability to respect her child's differences and not perceive them as betrayals. A good mother can allow her child to be less than perfect. ~~ Victoria Secunda

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next. ~~ Nora Ephron

Momsense is language or ideas intelligible only to mothers. ~~ Teresa Bloomingdale

Winston Churchill was not entirely British. His mother was American, making Sir Winston part Iroquois Indian. ~~ Deane Jordan

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. ~~ Brian Wilson

If Mom's not happy, nobody's happy. ~~ Neely [age 13]

My mother is everywhere…
In the perfume of a rose,
The eyes of a tiger,
The pages of a book,
The food that we partake,
The whistling wind of the desert,
The blazing gems of sunset,
The crystal light of full moon,
The opal veils of sunshine. ~~ Grace Seton-Thompson

Yes, a mother is one thing that nobody can do without. And when you have harassed her, buffeted her about, tried her patience, and worn her out, and it seems that the end of the world is about to descend on you, then you can win her back with four little words, "Mom, I love you." ~~ William A. Greenbaum II

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. ~~ Margaret Sanger

I fear, as any daughter would, losing myself back into the mother. ~~ Kim Chernin

Mothers who have little sense of their own minds and voices are unable to imagine such capacities in their children. Not being fully aware of the power of words for communicating meaning, they expect their children to know what is on their minds without the benefit of words. These parents do not tell their children what they mean by "good," much less why. Nor do they ask the children to explain themselves. ~~ Mary Field Belenky

One of the things your mother wrote you that hit me hard was her advice, "Let go your hold" as Wm. James says, "resign your destiny to higher powers." ~~ Agnes Meyer to Adlai E. Stevenson

For that's what a woman, a mother wants -- to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own. ~~ Marguerite Duras

My mother is a travel agent for guilt trips. ~~ Unattributed

Being a mother, as far as I can tell, is a constantly evolving process of adapting to the needs of your child while also changing and growing as a person in your own right. ~~ Deborah Insel

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials. ~~ Meryl Streep

Motherhood is not meant for the fainthearted. Used frogs, skinned knees, and the insults of teenage girls are not meant for the wimpy. ~~ Danielle Steele

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. ~~ Oscar Wilde

I appreciate my mom more than she knows. ~~ David [age 15]

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together. ~~ Pearl S. Buck

Despite all the loving and caring relationships in the world, there is nothing more loving than the feel of my mother's hand on my forehead when I am sick. ~~ Rosemary [age 17]

[On receiving the 1980 National Mother's Day Committee Award as the natural mother of 6 and adoptive mother of 14:] Of course I don't always enjoy being a mother. At those times my husband and I hop up somewhere in the wine country, eat, drink, make mad love and pretend we were born sterile and raise poodles. ~~ Dorothy DeBolt [in San Francisco "Chronicle"]

When your mother is mad and asks you, "Do I look stupid?" it's best not to answer her. ~~ Meghann [age 13]

There is no such thing as a non-working mother. ~~ Hester Mundis ["Powermom"]

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names. ~~ Alice Walker

When the strongest words for what I have to offer come out of me sounding like words I remember from my mother's mouth, then I have to reassess the meaning of everything I have to say now, or re-examine the worth of her old words. ~~ Audre Lorde

Many a man is proud of his father and mother because they are the parents of such a wonderful person. ~~ Unattributed

He and I were standing inside the threshold of his bare country room and bending over a box where the mother cat was sleeping with her four kittens. The children were all sleeping head to foot, with their tails in each other's mouths so that together they looked like one big cat. ~~ Phillip Lopate

I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli! ~~ George Bush

mother never realizes that her children are no longer children. ~~ Holbrook Jackson

When a man talks to you about his mother's cooking, pay no attention, for between the ages of 12 and 21, a boy can eat large quantities of anything and never feel it. ~~ Sarah Tyson Rorer

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

In the final analysis, each of us is responsible for what we are. We cannot blame it on our mothers, who thanks to Freud, have replaced money as the root of all evil. ~~ Helen Lawerson

[On motherhood:] You can't change your mind -- you know, and say, this isn't working out, let's sell. ~~ Fran Lebowitz

The art of living is to function in society without doing violence to one's own needs or to the needs of others. The art of mothering is to teach the art of living to children. ~~ Elaine Heffner

You may have intangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be --
I had a mother who read to me. ~~ Strickland Gillilan

[On the death of her mother, Judy Garland:] It wasn't suicide. It wasn't sleeping pills, it wasn't cirrhosis. I think she was just tired, like a flower that blooms and gives joy and beauty to the world and then wilts away. ~~ Liza Minelli

America's mothers hold a special place in our hearts, providing the lessons and care that have enabled generations of children to embrace the opportunities of this great land. They embody the compassion, devotion, and energy that have always defined our national character, and their daily efforts anchor our country's commitment to the fundamental values of respect and tolerance. Mothers impart both the strength that enables us to face our challenges and the love that comforts and sustains us.

…we recognize that mothers' roles have changed significantly in recent years. Today, mothers are CEOs and teachers, physicians and nurses, elected officials and PTA presidents, police officers and volunteers, homemakers and heads of households. Many serve on the front lines of the struggle against violence and poverty. These women -- problem solvers, caregivers, and teachers -- are using their talents in every sector of our society, helping all Americans to look forward with hope and faith in the future.

…remember our mothers -- whether biological, foster, or adoptive. ~~ Presidential Mother's Day Proclamation 1996

You'll hold a spot down deep in my heart,
'Till the stars no longer shine.
Your soul shall live on forever,
On through the fields of time.
For there'll never be another to me,
Like that wonderful Mother of mine. ~~ Clyde Hager

A picture memory brings to me;
I look across the years and see
Myself beside my mother's knee
I feel her gentle hand restrain
My selfish moods, and know again
A child's blind sense of wrong and pain.
But wiser now,
A man gray grown,
My childhood's needs are better known.
My mother's chastening love I own. ~~ John Greenleaf Whitter

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. ~~ Unattributed

Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's secret hope outlives them all. ~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual, and physical education I received from her. ~~ George Washington

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness. ~~ Honore de Balzac

[After his daughter Stephanie went swimming fully clad alongside models wearing swimwear she had designed:] I can be a good father but I'm a terrible mother. ~~ Rainier, Prince of Monaco

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. You are connected to your child and to all those who touch your lives. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child. ~~ Sophia Loren

omen as caregivers -- wives, mothers, grandmothers, teachers, friends -- are at the center of the wheel of life and, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, must strive "to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations, and activities." ~~ LaDawn Jacob

he influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation. ~~ James E. Faust

In the next year or so, my signature will appear on $60 billion of United States currency. More important to me, however, is the signature that appears on my life -- the strong, proud, assertive handwriting of a loving father and mother. ~~ Katherine D. Ortega

Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but

I

f it doesn't interest you, don't do it … I would have made a terrible mother. ~~ Katharine Hepburn

N

eurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them. ~~ Rita Rudner

As is the mother, so is her daughter. ~~ Ezekiel 16:44

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still. ~~ Nancy Friday

[On motherhood:] Nothing else will make you as happy or as sad, as proud or as tired, for nothing is quite as hard as helping a person develop his own individuality -- especially while you struggle to keep your own. ~~ Marguerite Kelly and Elia Parsons

The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one's mind. ~~ Margaret Mead

All that I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother. I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life. ~~ Abraham Lincoln

By no amount of agile exercising of a wistful imagination could my mother have been called lenient. Generous she was: indulgent, never. Kind, yes; permissive never. In her world, people she accepted paddled their own canoes, pulled their own weight, put their own shoulders to their own plows and pushed like hell. ~~ Maya Angelou

It is odd how all men develop the notion, as they grow older, that their mothers were wonderful cooks. I have yet to meet a man who will admit that his mother was a kitchen assassin and nearly poisoned him. ~~ Robertson Davies

[My mother] seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present. ~~ Madeleine L'Engle

My mother thought it would make us feel better to know animals had no souls and thus their deaths were not to be taken seriously. But it didn't help and when I think of some of the animals I've known, I wonder. The only really "soulful" eyes in the world belong to the dog or cat who sits on your lap or at your feet commiserating when you cry. ~~ Liz Smith