Dead Mother Quotes

It was time to face the second hardest fact in her life; she had a dead mother, and a father who was actively killing himself, but not with the quick shot of a gun, but rather, with the slow tilt of the bottle. ~ Alex Morgan

Sally wasn't crying about their dead mother or her cancer. She was crying because her husband, Alfonso, had left her after twenty years for a young woman. It seemed a brutal thing to do, just after her mastectomy. She was devastated, but no, she wouldn't ever divorce him, even though the woman was pregnant and he wanted to marry her.

"They can just wait until I die. I'll be dead soon, probably next year..." Sally wept but the ocean drowned out the sound. ~ Lucia Berlin

My dear dead mother wanted me to go into an honorable trade, like grave robbing. Would I listen? No. Be an assassin, like your uncle Gustav, she said. Would I pay heed? No. Apprentice to the Necromancer― ~ Raymond E. Feist

We met Dr. Hall in such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead. ~ Jane Austen

I've had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died. ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

My mother was real and her son was real. When he died she buried him. Now she is dead. Mother Courage and her children, my mother and her son. They are all stories now. ~ Patti Smith

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

Well, I tell myself, it could be worse. You could have been rescued by some fifty-year-old perv sporting a spare tire the size of a monster truck's who keeps his dead mother in the attic. ~ Rick Yancey

Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love. ~ Dan Savage

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off. ~ Judith Viorst

Tell me, Connie, is your mother still dead? ~ Ed Sullivan

I've spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one after she died, I liked having a dead mother much more than having an impossible one. [p. 47] ~ Anne Lamott

I wanted, I told her, to lie under the stars and smell different breezes. I wanted to drink different waters, feel different heats. Stand with my comrades atop the ruin of old ideas. Plant my boot and steel my eye and not run.
I said all this to my dead mother, spoke it down through the dirt: there was a conflagration to come; I wanted to lend it my spark. ~ Laird Hunt

Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced. Father dead. Mother off the deep end. Shuttled around and rejected time and time again. And still she breathes and sleeps and grows taller. She wakes up every morning and puts on clothes. So when she says it's okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything. ~ Christina Baker Kline

She may hear this story, someday, and wonder what it has to do with her. A girl hiding her scared in her prettiness, an unwanted baby, a dead mother. These are not her heartbreaks. Every heart is fractured differently and she knows the pattern of her cracks, she traces them like lines across her palm. She has a living mother and besides, she was always wanted. Prayed for, even. Now she's grown, or at least she thinks she is. But she hasn't yet learned from the mathematics of grief. The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains. She's heard her granddaddy preach about the good shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind in search of the one lost sheep.
But what about the flock he abandons? she wonders. Aren't they lost now too? ~ Brit Bennett

I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike. ~ Mary Harris Jones

She didn't want to think about how wrong this was or how foolish it was to give herself to a known seducer. Because tonight Oliver wasn't that man. Not to her. He was the boy who'd cried over his dead mother, the young man who'd lost himself in drink and women to forget the past, the marquess who'd vowed not to marry for money. He was the man to be her lover. ~ Sabrina Jeffries

Thoughts of Abigail filled her world. By all accounts she had bee a tall, thin, woman, whose eyes held a power beyond the black pools of er irises. Tall, thin, and dark, she, this Abigail, looked so much like the other that her father had named her the same She was more ghost than her mother, however, moving with the quality of light breathing though a house in which the only footprints in the dust were those of her dead mother. Even her laughter, at once wild and reigned in, was all Abigail. ~ Chris Abani

God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead - and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you.
Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and impersonating her with consummate art and naturalness? There is the rub, there is the horror; the more so as the acting will go on and on, endlessly; never, never, never, never, never will your soul in that other world be quite sure that the sweet gentle spirits crowding about it are not fiends in disguise, and forever, and forever, and forever shall your soul remain in doubt, expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I saw some piglets suckling their dead mother. After a short while they shuddered and went away. They had sensed that she could no longer see them and that she wasn't like them any more. What they loved in their mother wasn't her body, but whatever it was that made her body live. ~ Confucius

Reading every day keeps the brain dead sickness away. ~ Kristy Pellegrin

In the final analysis luck is more important than skill. But any Marine who relies on luck to accomplish his mission is a dead Marine. ~ David Sherman

That's perfect, isn't it? I'm sex and money; you're dead bodies. What a team we are ."
"Best to stick with our strengths. ~ J.D. Robb

It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love? ~ Celeste Ng

Dead bodies didn't resemble unconscious ones; it was as if you could sense that something had fled from them, that some essential spark was now missing. ~ Cassandra Clare

It is not enough to say, simply, the motherland called and we fought; woe to the dead, and to the living goes their glory. ~ A.H. Septimius

They never see what you are." Shocked, Jude glanced around to see who'd spoken, then realized she had.
"Don't they?" Brenna wanted to know, lifting her brow as she topped off Jude's glass yet again.
"They see a reflection of their own perception. Whore or angel, mother or child. Depending on their view, they're compelled to protect or conquer or exploit. Or you're a convenience," she murmured.
"Easily discarded. ~ Nora Roberts

This tradition doesn't exist for Bengalis, naming a son after father or grandfather, a daughter after mother or grandmother. This sign of respect in America ad Europe, this symbol of heritage and lineage, would be ridiculed in India. Within Bengali families, individual names are sacred, inviolable. They are not meant to be inherited or shared. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

In fact if you're a mother or a father, you're filled with oxytocin when you have a child. It makes you love the baby, even though they look like a lizard .You'll think it's the beautiful thing in the world. ~ Tony Robbins

The ones who are already dead but don't realize it. ~ Suzanne Young

How can you kill a man who'd already been dead for years? ~ Peter Hedges

Papa was a man with silver eyes, not dead ones.
Papa was an accordion!
But his bellows were all empty.
Nothing went in and nothing came out. ~ Markus Zusak

I do not wish to die: but I care not if I were dead.
[Lat., Emori nolo: sed me esse mortuum nihil aestimo.] ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Do you wanna play? Everyone's dead, so I got bored. Did you come to play with me?
Wrath ~ Hiromu Arakawa

Cinema is dead, long live cinema. ~ Peter Greenaway

I can't do what my mother did, which is tell me every single day of my life about her labor and how long it was and how it was 36 hours of hell . ~ Kristen Stewart

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet. ~ Edward Thomas

Before I was a mother, if I'd been photographed in a bikini, I'd have been mortified. ~ Kate Winslet

My mother was from Mississippi, or is from 'Mississippi;' my father was from Alabama. He speaks about conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. They were really the poster children for the bad public laws that segregated, according to race, in our country. ~ Faye Wattleton

Being a mother of two myself - and two small girls - I think that single parenting is hard. ~ Sarah Clarke

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down. ~ Margaret Atwood

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing - a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming. ~ Terence McKenna

The rosary is the most powerful weapon to touch the Heart of Jesus, Our Redeemer, who loves His Mother. ~ Louis De Montfort

Ben's dead," he says not moving or breaking his stare.

"And?"

"Just thought you should know," he says, looking at me in the eyes like he's waiting for me to confess.

"Thanks for waking me up to share the information," I tell him. "Where's Venessa?"

"At home," he says. "Needed to see you first, alone."

"Quit looking at me like that, partner," I tell him. "I ain't left this floor all night." Which isn't a lie. Ben's room is on this floor, but he doesn't know I know that.

"Even if you did, you know I wouldn't - "

"Partner," I tell him straight, letting him figure it out. "I didn't shut off his life support."

After he blinks several times he gives me that smirk. He looks around me to my sleeping wife and then back at me and tells me straight, too. "Go back to sleep partner. You look like shit."

With that he gets up and walks out.

Staring at the door he walks out of, I smile. He gets it. Turns out the staff at that front desk got it, too. They didn't stop my wife from doing what she needed to do; seems like they had other shit going at that time. Heard through the grapevine one of the women taken and held by Ben happened to work on this very floor. It also turns out the coffee pot wasn't working and it was an all hands on deck kinda thing to get it fixed. I get it, the women need their coffee. They also didn't run to his aid until I had my wife safe back in her bed. Those ~ K.S. Adkins

The motionless person was once full of life in one moment in time. What a misery? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Don't be so sure you know where to draw the line," he said. "We carry our past with us. And, mother mine, there's a thing you don't know and should - we are Harkonnens." Her ~ Frank Herbert

My mother, of course, had a different opinion.
'They're driving me crazy!' she said, swatting at them with her beige Coach handbag.
'How can you tell?' my dad asked. 'Between your menopause craziness and your turning fifty craziness and everything else?'
'Forty-eight!' my mom cried.
Dad groaned. 'Have you forgotten who you're lying to? ~ Megan McCafferty

A Far Cry From Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool ~ Derek Walcott

That's the thing about life - you don't know how long you have until you're dead, and by then, you don't know much of anything at all. ~ David Arnold

Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother's breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful ... Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun. ~ Andre Gide

A Harris poll I've seen says only 12 percent of the electorate names taxes as one of the most important issues facing the nation. Voters put tax cuts dead last, behind education, Social Security, health care, Medicare and poverty. ~ Lane Evans

Mom lies down next to me and we both stare at the ceiling in complete silence. "Boys are like candy," she suddenly says. I grin. "Really, Mom? That's your advice? Boys are like candy. What is that? Forrest Gump on teens? ~ Rucy Ban

I even heard that they can bring people back from the dead."
"Jesus," Butter swore.
"I kinda doubt they had anything to do with that one."
"No, no, I meant --"
"I know what you meant. t was a joke, Butters. ~ Jim Butcher

Food during my early years was a very difficult issue for me. I grew up in an addictive family. My mother had serious problems with alcohol and prescription drugs. I was an overweight kid. I can remember back in those days there weren't the strategies that there are today to deal with those issues. ~ Tom Vilsack

Whatever his circumstances and surroundings, it was only a dead imagination that could call him a failure. ~ Peter Straub

God inspired me, because I was blessed with the knowledge that I wanted to do this. And my mother supported it. She said, 'Whatever it is you want to do. If you believe acting or comedy is what you really want to do, I can only tell you it's not easy, it's very hard, but I'll support you.' Her supporting me enabled me to move forward. ~ Martin Lawrence

We look to the East for a wisdom that we shall not use - and to the sleeper for the secret that we shall not find. So, I say, what of the night, the terrible night? The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart, and that night-fowl that caws against her spirit and yours, dropping between you and her the awful estrangement of his bowels. The drip of your tears in his implacable pulse. Night people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures. And where you go, it goes, the two of you, your living and her dead, that will not die; to daylight, to life, to grief, until both are carrion. ~ Djuna Barnes

The golden rule says do unto others as you would have done unto you. The mother-in-law rule says do unto others as they would have done unto them. ~ Susan Abel Lieberman

Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento? ~ Joan Didion

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears. ~ Honore De Balzac

Tabitha stared at him. "Oliver, do you think your mother and father love you? Do they tell you that?"

He looked embarrassed. "Yes, of course."

Wiping a hand on the side of her apron, Tabitha tapped a finger to Oliver's temple so that her words would stick. "Then they are perfect parents, no matter their shortcomings in understanding. (pg. 222) ~ Jessica Lawson

Once when I was young-maybe more than once-when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophie, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectful toward me. When I mentioned I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.
"Oh dear, it's just a misunderstanding. Amy was speaking metaphorically-right, Amy? you didn't actually call Sophie 'garbage.'"
"Um, yes I did. But it's all in the context," I tried to explain. "It's a Chinese immigrant thing. ~ Amy Chua

That also means the antivirus software you are running on your own computer is likely only catching 5 percent of the emerging threats targeting your machine. If your body's own immune system had a batting average like that, you would be dead in a matter of hours. ~ Marc Goodman

Ash told me you threw his tracking spell into the river. Why?" She cringed slightly. "Yeah, that. It's hard to explain ..." "Try." The command was firm but his voice was gentle. "I watched him die," she said, her eyes dropping to the sidewalk. "I saw the daggers go into his chest. I saw him fall over the edge. And I thought that was it. I thought he was dead and that it was my fault. When I found out he was alive, I knew I could never let that happen again. I couldn't let him die for me - die fighting my battles. It's not his responsibility to make sure that I survive to the next day. ~ Annette Marie

There's still a little girl inside every grown woman who would love to be able to fall into the arms of her mother and cry her eyes out every now and then. ~ Toni Sorenson