Birth Mother Quotes

My natural mother died one month after I was born, apparently due to giving birth at an advanced age. ~ Koichi Tanaka

I originally feared she might be dead, which felt like a sealed book that I would never be able to read. To have a birth mother die before getting any closure or answers seemed like it would be a cruel twist of fate. ~ Janet Louise Stephenson

The bond between mother and baby is so interesting. Women have been giving birth since the beginning of time, but when it happens to you it feels like a miracle. ~ Rachel Weisz

Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I'm eternally grateful to {our birth mother}, but wish I had never needed her. It's a loaded friendship, a complex connection. ~ Jana Wolff

The day of birth is a miraculous day. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It's funny. When we were alive we spent much of our time staring up at the cosmos and wondering what was out there. We were obsessed with the moon and whether we could one day visit it. The day we finally walked on it was celebrated worldwide as perhaps man's greatest achievement. But it was while we were there, gathering rocks from the moon's desolate landscape, that we looked up and caught a glimpse of just how incredible our own planet was. Its singular astonishing beauty. We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry. ~ Jon Stewart

You have a mother?"
He quirked a brow. "Did you think mine was some sort of divine birth? My father was a remarkable man, but even he was not that talented. ~ Julia Quinn

When we [adoption agency] have a birth mother who is pregnant and she doesn't know the race of the father, she is using drugs, and she is in crisis, usually we cannot place that baby with a heterosexual family. Almost all of the times when we have a drug-addicted child, we place the baby in a homosexual family. ~ Rosie O'Donnell

My mother desperately wanted children. She had a child that was stillborn - something I learned when I was looking through her 'effects' after she had died. It was then that I discovered my original birth certificate, which indicated the previous birth. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

I made a crash landing here on Earth on February 14, 1962, in the Shreveport Catholic Charities Home for un-wed mothers. The infamous Bonnie and Clyde lost their lives just miles from where I was born. Like outlaws ourselves, my birth mother and I were on the run from the day she found out I was part of her. ~ Kevyn Aucoin

There's only three major elements. Air, land, which is your flesh and water, which is your blood. You're walking on a third of yourself. She's called Mother Earth. She gave birth to your ass. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, your maggot food ass going right back to her! ~ Eddie Griffin

I certainly never felt rejected because they had given me up. My parents knew nothing about my birth mother, yet always explained with certainty that she didn't "give me up" or "give me away" - she made a plan for me, the best one she could make under her circumstances, whatever those were. ~ Emily Giffin

Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within ... Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born. ~ Erma Bombeck

Birth Matters ... It matters because it is the way we all begin our lives outside of our source, our mother's bodies. It's the means from which we enter and feel our first impression of the wider world. For each mother, it is an event that shakes and shapes her to her innermost core. Women's perceptions about their bodies and their babies' capabilities will be deeply influenced by the care they receive around the time of birth. ~ Ina May Gaskin

It's not just the making of babies, but the making of mothers that midwives see as the miracle of birth. ~ Barbara Katz Rothman

Her next words took me by surprise. I lay as still as I could, barely breathing, afraid that if I moved she would stop speaking her heart.
"My mom wanted six children. She only got me, and that sucks for her because I was a total weirdo."
"You were not," I said.
She twisted her head up to look at me.
"I used to line my lips in black eyeliner and sit cross-legged on the kitchen table … meditating."
"Not that bad," I said. "Crying out for attention."
"Okay, when I was twelve I started writing letters to my birth mother because I wanted to be adopted."
I shook my head. "Your childhood sucked, you wanted a new reality."
She snorted air through her nose. "I thought a mermaid lived in my shower drain, and I used to call her Sarah and talk to her."
"Active imagination," I countered. She was becoming more insistent, her little body wriggling in my grip.
"I used to make paper out of dryer lint."
"Nerdy."
"I wanted to be one with nature, so I started boiling grass and drinking it with a little bit of dirt for sugar."
I paused. "Okay, that's weird."
"Thank you!" she said. Then, she got serious again. "My mom just loved me through all of it. ~ Tarryn Fisher

The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her. ~ Steven Pressfield

DNA testing poses questions that people in the adoptee community have thought about far longer than such testing has been around. Will my birth mother/father/half-sister be happy to know me? And more broadly, what is that person to me? What do we mean when we speak of 'family'? How much does genetics get to tell us about who we are? ~ Libby Copeland

I rang my mother to thank her for giving birth to me and she said, What choice had I? You were in there, how else were you going to get out? ~ Marian Keyes

Listening to Eddy describe his relationship with our mom seemed to indicate that what I feared would be my reality. He never talked poorly about our mother, but he was as honest and sincere as he could be. In a way, he was almost defensive of her to us – trying to help us understand what life had been like for her, so that we could comprehend the choices that she had made. ~ Janet Louise Stephenson

There's a book called 'The Shack' - it had a lot to do with me coming full circle, meeting my birth mother. Awhile back, my birth mom and my adopted mom came to my show together, and it was pretty surreal. ~ Rodney Atkins

According to my file, I was abandoned on the steps of the children's home in Telbury with a birth certificate tucked inside the shawl. The certificate stated my name, date of birth, and place of birth - which was Aldabury Maternity Hospital - and my birth mother's name and address. All I have is my first name and date and place of birth. Everything else regarding my birth mother on the certificate seems to be false. ~ Lorna Peel

When his thumb hovered over the red button, she stared at him aghast. "You're truly going to … torture me?"
He cast her a puzzled look. "Why wouldn't I torture you?"
Because you used to love me, used to cherish me. "I thought we had a moment yesterday? Didn't you like seeing me in lingerie?"
In a monotone voice, he said, "Why did the charge throwers have no ill effect on you?"
He's truly going to do it? Then fuck him. DEFCON. "Chase, I've tussled with vibrators stronger than your charge throwers."
No reaction. "You consumed energy. And channeled it at will. How?"
All Valkyrie consumed it - they were each connected through a grid of mystical energy - but Regin was the only one she knew of who could radiate it through her body. She'd inherited the talent from her birth mother. "So how does one get started as a magister? College or trade school?"
"I don't have the time or patience for games. Now, tell me, why do you … glow?"
"I touched a radioactive alien cock once."
He pressed the button. ~ Kresley Cole

The discussion about how she was in Arizona stalking her birth mother, whose name she'd gotten on the duplicate birth certificate she'd ordered because she'd lost her original, should really happen in person, but that was impossible right now.
Oh, what a tangled web ... ~ Cat Johnson

It rewrites the contract, I'd read somewhere. Your self's no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket. ~ Glen Duncan

I forget your name," I said.
"Most people spew shit from their arse," he retorted, "you manage it with your mouth."
"Your mother gave birth through her arse," I said, "and you still reek of her shit. ~ Bernard Cornwell

The birth of a child is a joy to the parent and the world. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I am the mother of three children whose birth mother died of cancer when they were young. When I met them, they were ages twelve, ten, and eight, all grieving in very different ways. I have seen first hand the pain and confusion that accompanies childhood loss. But I have also seen the healing that can take place when children begin to understand who Jesus is and how much He loves them. By using our family's personal experience as a foundation, I hope this book will be a refuge for grieving children to express their sorrow, to feel understood in all their pain, and to come to know that God is their ultimate source of comfort, healing, hope, and joy here on earth, as well as in heaven. ~ Kathleen Fucci

Because they've either conveniently forgotten with time or they're trying to be supportive, most mothers won't tell you how hard pregnancy (and then childbirth) can be. Let me tell you, it is. It's brutal sometimes! But, if I did it, ANYONE can do it. I mean, I always knew I was meant to do something really BIG in life, and now I know that this was it. Screw winning an Academy Award someday ... I GAVE BIRTH ~ Jenny McCarthy

A mother isn't the person who births you; it's the person who rears you and shows you love. ~ Raquel Cepeda

We had a meeting where we were supposed to learn how to respond to jerks who ask things like "When did you know you were adopted?" Most people picture a scene where the parents sit you down and you "find out who you are." I didn't need that meeting to know how to answer, because all I had to do was look in the mirror. When people ask me that question, I always say, "When did you find out you weren't adopted? How do you know your mother is your birth mother? ~ Lisa See

I think open adoption is a great idea, because it allows a relationship between the birth mother and her child so that the kid isn't like, "Where did I come from?" And to have it be like, "Look, you have a bunch of people who love you." ~ Kathleen Hanna

It moves one's heart to think: Nine months before I was born there was a woman who loved me deeply. She did not know what I was going to be like, but she loved me because she carried me in her womb. And when she gave me birth, she took me in her arms, because her love was not just beginning - she conceived it along with me. A mother loves - and that is why abortion is so abhorrent ... ~ Oscar Romero

Simon remembered a rhyme his mother used to recite to him, about magpies. You were supposed to count them and say: one for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for a birth, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret that's never been told.
"Right," simon said. He had already lost count of the numbers of birds there were. Seven, he guessed. A secret that's never been told. Whatever that was. ~ Cassandra Clare

The birth of a child is divine miracle. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who wish - because of claimed superiority of intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals - to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without sacrifice, to be exalted without humbling themselves to understand others and meet their needs. ~ George Gilder

If you knew everyone's story, you would love them. You can't really hate anyone if you know everything that happened to them between their birth and now; why they became the way they became; why they have walls up or down. If you truly know someone, you'd get it. ~ Emma Stone

Call me communist, but I think that's something that everyone, regardless of their family's income, has a right to, and I was fortunate enough to have a mother who felt that way as well. ~ Liev Schreiber

By our life and deeds of love, we are making the Church fully present in the world today. ~ Mother Teresa

The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned that world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a think they truly wanted to because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer.... The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn't something ruling over and above a fallen nature.... Our story of the fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature. ~ Joseph Campbell

Elvis was sincere, and he was - he was so loyal. And he was so homespun. He loved his mother, he loved America. You know, he loved his fellow man. He had a great humanitarian philanthropic sense. ~ Linda Thompson

You can make all the birth plans in the world, but at the end of the day - go with the flow. ~ Poppy Montgomery

And she did not weep for herself, but for him: the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house, lonely to himself and to the world. O lost. ~ Thomas Wolfe

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I think that I was raised by two of the best people ever. My mother and father are just the definition of hard work, like what hard work brings to you. They've taught me and my brothers and sisters to set your goals high and to give everything to reach them. ~ Josie Loren

One of my earliest memories is of seeing my mother in her beach chair, reading a book under an umbrella by the water's edge while my sisters and I played beside her. Of all the life lessons she taught me, that is one of my favorites: to take time at a place I love, restore my spirit with books and the beach. ~ Luanne Rice

If a boy doesn't respect his mother...run! ~ Tracy Yates

I don't believe that Jesus would approve abortion except in the case of incest, rape or the mother's life in danger. But I had to enforce the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade so I tried to do everything I could to minimize the need for abortions. ~ Jimmy Carter

Damn, she's good."
"Of course she bloody is," Pearl murmured, her ace still stuffed against Jack's neck, even though she sounded like the prim English woman she was, her tone turning curt. "She's my mother. ~ Scarlett Dawn

The Christians seized all the maize the locals of Nicaragua had grown for themselves and their own families and, as a consequence, some twenty or thirty thousand natives died of hunger, some mothers even killing their own children and eating them. ~ Bartolome De Las Casas

This time of year," she said, "people's consciences gnaw at them. They give away truckloads of canned goods and quote Dickens and wring their hands over the 'less fortunate.'" We boarded the Metro and took seats perpendicular to each other. "But God forbid anyone should address why they're poor in the first place, or try to change the structures that keep them poor. Then the 'less fortunate' turn into 'welfare queens' and 'derelicts.' But if I were a lobbyist whoring on behalf of some transnational corporation, I'd never hear the word 'derelict.'"

"So when it comes to taking care of poor people," I said, "if Mother Teresa is the Hallmark card, then you're the electric bill. ~ Jeri Smith-Ready

He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful. ~ Sherman Alexie

I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Your mother stands against everything my parents believe in," I say. "But I'm not my parents."
"Aria," Hunter whispers into my ear.
"Yes?"
"Just kiss me."
We press our lips together gentle, and it's like I am alive, on fire, like I can do anything in the world. I know this because he's a mystic, but there's something more familiar, something safe and sexy and irresistible about the way his lips feel, his tongue brushing lightly against mine. Our passion is like what's described in my love letters: it's like coming home, finally, when I never even knew I'd been away. ~ Theo Lawrence

My daughter teases me once in a while saying, Remember when you used to be my mother and you had black hair? ~ Loni Anderson

He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it. ~ Jess Walter

This was my mother's chosen disciplinary method: unable to strike us, she ordered us to seal our lips. Some echo, no doubt, of the great silence with which her own mother had tormented Aadam Aziz lingered in her ears - because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound - and with an emphatic "Chup!" she would place a finger across her lips and command our tongues to be still. ~ Salman Rushdie

What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It's unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn't care. That's intolerable to us. How can we live in a world so indifferent to us. So we redefine nature. We call it Mother Nature when it's not a parent in any real sense of the term. ~ Michael Crichton

My mother was the best and most beautiful woman who ever lived. She was clean, and good, and always helped "the poor and needy who cluster round your door," like it says in the poetry piece, and there never could have been a reason why God would want a woman to suffer herself, when she went flying on horseback even dark nights through rain or snow, to doctor other people's pain, and when she gave away things like she did - why, I've seen her take a big piece of meat from the barrel, and a sack of meal, and heaps of apples and potatoes to carry to Mandy Thomas - when she gave away food by the wagonload at a time, God couldn't have wanted her to be hungry, and yet she was that very minute almost crying for food; ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Charlie glared at the puppet. "I'm really mad."
"Sure you are. Super mad." Leo circled his head one way and then the other. "I've got an idea."
"What?"
"Tell him how mad you are. Then look really pitiful and ask him to take you Boogie-boarding. If you look pitiful enough, I bet he'll feel so bad that he'll take you."
Charlie wasn't born yesterday. He looked past Leo to the man holding him. "Really! Can we go right now?"
His father set Leo aside and shrugged. "The waves look good. Why not? Get your stuff."
Charlie jumped up, and raced toward the house. His legs pumping. But just as he got to the front step, he stopped and whipped around. "I get to drive!"
"No you don't!" his mother countered, slipping Scamp from her arm.
Charlie stomped inside, and his father laughed. "I love that kid. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Death is feared as birth is forgotten. ~ Douglas Horton

Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection - in memory - that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us. ~ Sue Miller

No, no, no! I am not giving birth backstage at a rock concert. I need to be in a hospital, pumped full of every drug that they can legally give me!
I was so shocked, my only repsonse was,
'Well, he was conceived backstage at a concert, so it's sort of fitting for him to be born at one. ~ S.C. Stephens

The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some *quality* of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Saige, Mother is ... " I briefly close my eyes and swallow, clearing my mouth from saliva. "Mother is dead. ~ Jada Berglund

I had a parakeet that used to fly around the house and crash into these huge mirrors my mother put in. Ever heard of this interior design principle, that a mirror makes it seem like you have an entire other room? What kind of jerk walks up to a mirror and goes, Hey look, there's a whole other room in there. There's a guy that looks just like me in there. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

When teachers or people in authority put me down or in one way or another tried to make me feel less than equal to what they thought I should be - my mother was on my side. It was amazing. ~ Maya Angelou

Speaking two languages may seem a relative affluence, but more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment even though your body can be in one place at a time. When I return to Urdu, I feel shocked at my own neglect of a space so intimate to me: like relearning the proportions of a once-familiar room, it takes me by surprise to recollect that I need not feel grief, I can eat grief; that I need not bury my mother but instead can offer her into the earth, for I am in Urdu now. ~ Sara Suleri

My mother's blueberry pie from scratch was amazing. I still make it today. ~ Geoffrey Zakarian

No, the frigid, cold, empty thing that lives inside me showed up the day after my mother died. It told me it was pointless to care about people. It told me it was useless to consider what they think or feel or desire out of life. ~ Callie Hart

Death, in the final analysis, is only the easiest and quickest means to go back to God. If only we could make people understand that we come from God and that we have to go back to Him! ~ Mother Teresa

A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes ... And a good mother is someone whose child wants to follow her. ~ Jodi Picoult

I take a swig from Milo's flask and hand it back to him. He screws the top back on. He inherited the flash from his grandfather and stole the liquor from his mother. The circle of life. ~ Courtney Summers

My mother as a young girl went out with a young SS officer and she didn't really know what was going on - she just liked the uniform. When he told her about the things that he did, she was disgusted and broke up with him. ~ Michael Haneke

We are all so obsessed with protecting out child, aren't we?" "That's how we got into this mess in the first place. We want to paint a lovely picture that we hang over their window to block out how the world really works, to give them these lives. And to do that, we think we need to keep ourselves perfect too. But no mother in the history of the world has been able to protect her child forever. the world barges in through the front door eventually. ~ Laura Hankin

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career ~ Pat Conroy

In the end, dear friend, it is always between us and God, not between us and them. ~ Mother Teresa

He is a demon, Clarissa," said Valentine, still in the same soft voice. "A demon with a man's face. I know how deceptive such monsters can be. Remember, I spared him once myself."
"Monster?" echoed Clary. She thought of Luke, Luke pushing her on the swings when she was five years old, higher, always higher; Luke at her graduation from middle school, camera clicking away like a proud father's; Luke sorting through each box of books as it arrived at his store, looking for anything she might like and putting it aside. Luke lifting her up to pull apples down from the trees near his farmhouse. Luke, whose place as her father this man was trying to take. "Luke isn't a monster," she said in a voice that matched Valentine's, steel for steel. "Or a murderer. You are."
"Clary!" It was Jace.
Clary ignored him. Her eyes were fixed on her father's cold black ones. "You murdered your wife's parents, not in battle but in cold blood," she said. "And I bet you murdered Michael Wayland and his little boy, too. Threw their bones in with my grandparents' so that my mother would think you and Jace were dead. Put your necklace around Michael Wayland's neck before you burned him so everyone would think those bones were yours. After all your talk about the untainted blood of the Clave - you didn't care at all about their blood or their innocence when you killed them, did you? Slaughtering old people and children in cold blood, that's monstrous. ~ Cassandra Clare

My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death ... In my professional and personal life, I have lived with the awareness of death's imminence for more than half a century, and labored in its constant presence for all but the first decade of that time. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

My real name is Mica, spelled with a C. My dad is called Michael. He wanted me to be called Michael but my mother said over her dead body. She wasn't into the whole junior thing. ~ Mika.

Mind-mother in Eddie's head spoke up at once, her voice as stern and commanding as the voice of a traffic cop: Don't you dare do it, Eddie! Don't you dare! Wet feet, that's one way - one of the thousands of ways - that colds start, ~ Stephen King