Great Grandmother Mothers Day Quotes

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. ~ Alice Walker

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.
I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.
You want a letter from me? she asked.
I told her yes.
Oh, God bless you, she said.
The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

My family was going back to England to visit my mother's grandmother, who was very ill. We went up to Liverpool and I met my great-aunt, who was just a force of nature. She was an elocution teacher and a huge enthusiast for theater and the classics. I took her amateur acting class, and she was really impressed with me. ~ Kim Cattrall

I love celebrating Mother's Day. Since I was a kid, it was a special day to tell my mother and grandmother how much I love them. Now that I'm a mom, it is a special day to spend with my children. ~ Kirsten Gillibrand

I'm part Spanish. My paternal grandfather came from Spain via Singapore to Manila. On my mother's side it's more mixture, with a Filipino mother and a father who was Scotch Irish-French; you know, white American hybrid. And I also have on my father's side a great-great-grandmother who was Chinese. So, I'm a hybrid. ~ Jessica Hagedorn

See what I mean? I think it's a generational thing." She turned to him, and a faint smile played at the corners of her mouth. "My mother's parents were in love. They met at a concert. My grandfather saw my grandmother across the sea of people and bam - love at first sight. He bought a rose from a vendor, walked right up to her, and asked her out. From that day forward, he brought her a rose every ~ Katie Graykowski

At about 40, the roles started slowing down. I started getting offers to play mothers and grandmothers. ~ Kathleen Turner

from Testimony"

Outside the night was cold, the snow was deep
on sill and sidewalk; but in our kitchen
it was bright and warm.
I smelt the damp clothes
as my mother lifted them from the basket,
the pungent smell of melting wax
as she rubbed it on the iron,
and the good lasting smell of meat and potatoes
in the black pot that simmered on the stove.
The stove was so hot it was turning red.
My mother lifted the lid of the pot
to stir the roast with a long wooden spoon:
Father would not be home for another hour.
I tugged at her skirts. Tell me a story!
Once upon a time (the best beginning!)
there was a rich woman, a baroness, and a poor woman, a beggar.
The poor woman came every day to beg and every day
the rich woman gave her a loaf of bread
until the rich woman was tired of it.
I will put poison in the next loaf, she thought,
to be rid of her.
The beggar woman thanked the baroness for that loaf and went to her hut,
but, as she was going through the fields,
she met the rich woman's son coming out of the forest.
"Hello, hello, beggar woman!" said the young baron,
"I have been away for three days hunting
and am very hungry.
I know you are coming from my mother's
and that she has given you a loaf of bread;
let me have it--she will give you another."
"Gladly, gladly," said the beggar woman,
and, without knowing it was p ~ Charles Reznikoff

There is no teacher equal to mother and there's nothing more contagious than the dignity of a father. ~ Amit Ray

My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it. ~ Stephen King

Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in the war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers. ~ Tadeusz Borowski

Our living quarters were in the same compound as the Eastern District administration. Government offices were mostly housed in large mansions which had been confiscated from Kuomintang officials and wealthy landlords. All government employees, even senior officials, lived at their office. They were not allowed to cook at home, and all ate in canteens. The canteen was also where everyone got their boiled water, which was fetched in thermos flasks.

Saturday was the only day married couples were allowed to spend together. Among officials, the euphemism for making love was 'spending a Saturday." Gradually, this regimented life-style relaxed a bit and married couples were able to spend more time together, but almost all still lived and spent most of their time in their office compounds.

My mother's department ran a very broad field of activities, including primary education, health, entertainment, and sounding out public opinion. At the age of twenty-two, my mother was in charge of all these activities for about a quarter of a million people. She was so busy we hardly ever saw her. The government wanted to establish a monopoly (known as 'unified purchasing and marketing') over trade in the basic commodities grain, cotton, edible o'fi, and meat. The idea was to get the peasants to sell these exclusively to the government, which would then ration them out to the urban population and to parts of the country where they were in short supply. ~ Jung Chang

I sincerely believe that if Bush and Cheney recognized the full humanity of other people's mothers around the world, they wouldn't commit the crimes they commit. ~ Wallace Shawn

I'm not a good father and they're not children any more; the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and, because of what the law was, they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more. ~ Wilbur Smith

Rafe hadn't sworn in front of a lady since he was fifteen and said something unacceptable in his mother's hearing. Though he'd been twice her size already, she grabbed him by his hair queue and dragged him to her boudoir, where she proceeded to wash his mouth out with lavendar soap. He had been vilely sick, to this day couldn't bear the scent of lavendar, anhd watched his tongue around females of all ages and social rank. ~ Laurie Alice Eakes

Jen's Mum Will Write
Jen's mum writes advertising copy.
She specializes in white goods:
washing machines, dryers, fridges,
freezers, dishwashers.
She hates these appliances
hulking
in corners,
power-hungry and fractious.
One day, she will have a wood stove,
and she'll write about things that matter-
she will write about birth and death,
about love and the absence of love,
about fathers and children,
about mothers and daughters,
about lovers and friends.
She'll write about the whole goddamn
wonderful, awful business
of loving and being loved ~ Margaret Wild

My mother raised me to not hold grudges so I rather forgive and let my tiny heart be at peace. ~ Nitya Prakash

Principal Brill, those costumes were made by my mother. My mother, who has stage four small-cell lung cancer. My mother, who will never watch her little boy celebrate another Halloween again. My mother, who will more than likely experience a year of 'lasts'. Last Christmas. Last birthday. Last Easter. And if God is willing, her last Mother's Day. My mother, who when asked by her nine-year-old son if he could be her cancer for Halloween, had no choice but to make him the best cancerous tumor-riden lung costume she could. So if you think it's so offensive, I suggest you drive them home yourself and tell my mother to her face. Do you need my address? ~ Colleen Hoover

I just think I'm blessed. I love the Lord Jesus Christ. I have a great grandmother that passed away at 104 and two grandparents that passed away at 97 and 95, and they never worried about protein. They just enjoyed life, and that's what I'm doing. ~ Herschel Walker

In one way or another,
you owe your life to Mother. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I was trying to understand my grandmother feelings. Why, when I looked at and held the baby, I felt I was floating, that I was on a high.... I keep wanting to burst into song!
So I wasn't crazy, & I wasn't alone. When a grandmother holds the baby, her brain, like a new mother's, can also be drenched in the bonding hormone oxytocin.
Aha! There it was. We grandmas literally, actually fall in love. ~ Lesley Stahl

Our world is one of terrible contradictions. Plenty of food, but one billion people go hungry. Lavish lifestyles for a few, but poverty for too many others. Huge advances in medicine while mothers die every day in childbirth, and children die every day from drinking dirty water. Billions spent on weapons to kill people instead of keeping them safe. ~ Ban Ki-moon

Do you know ... what I think is a great pity? It is this: that we have all become such skeptics that we hardly believe what our pious grandmothers told us. ~ Isak Dinesen

--and yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again. ~ Camilla Way

Sadly, because of the enormous gap between rich and poor, some mothers can afford helpers, but many can't. Those who can would be kinder to refrain from criticizing other women. ~ Erica Jong

My great-great-great-grandmother ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Oh, not the kind of courage that makes a soldier go across no-man's land. That's the kind that he summons up because he has to. This kind is- well, it is part of one's will to live, part of one's instinct for self-preservation. Sometimes, we have to kill a little so we can live, when we don't-when women don't, they cry themselves to sleep and have their mothers wash out their hose every day. ~ Harper Lee

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day. ~ Sarah Ruhl

I work every day to live up to my mother's model. She was a very proud woman. And she really prepared me to go off into the world as a proud daughter. ~ Anita Hill

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

Pudge/Colonel:
"I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself.

But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss,

I guess. And I had this secret.
You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how

I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide.

She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would ~ John Green

She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled? ~ Brit Bennett

Mourning with no end, and a sense that I had lost everything - my child, my mother's love and protection, my father's love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself - hollowed me out. I floated every day alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside, inviting me to step into its current. ~ Meredith Hall

By day she studied and touched her mother's things, and by night, she dreamed about them. The dreams gave her as fragmented a vision of Marley as the boxes in the attic did. There were a thousand dramatic episodes, but very little sense of the person linking them together ~ Ann Brashares

My grandmother was probably the first person who I thought was beautiful. She was incredibly stylish, she had big hair, big cars. I was probably 3 years old, but she was like a cartoon character. She'd swoop into our lives with presents and boxes, and she always smelled great and looked great. ~ Tom Ford

The boat was vacuum-packed with Albanians, four generations to a family: great-grandmother, air-dried like a chilli pepper, deep red skin and a hot temper; grandmother, all sun-dried tomato, tough, chewy, skin split with the heat; getting the kids to rub olive oil into her arms; mother, moist as a purple fig, open everywhere - blouse, skirt, mouth, eyes, a wide-open woman, lips licking the salt spray flying from the open boat. Then there were the kids, aged four and six, a couple of squirs, zesty as lemons. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Postpartum depression is a very real and very serious problem for many mothers. It can happen to a first time mom or a veteran mother. It can occur a few days ... or a few months after childbirth. ~ Richard J. Codey

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. We all share the blood of the first mother. We are truly children of one blood. ~ Layne Redmond

Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness.
...
And this is what Queen Abir gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom--without which we might all have leapt into the Rimal in a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchmenters become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys, Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Pentexore folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion--and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up ~ Catherynne M. Valente

Parenthood is the passing of a baton, followed by a lifelong disagreement as to who dropped it. ~ Robert Breault

What can you say about a man, who on Mother's Day sends flowers to his mother-in-law, with a note thanking her for making him the happiest man on Earth? ~ Nancy Reagan

Mothers yielding Bibles, contemplating smearing the blood of lamb chops over her doorway. Anything to keep her son alive another day. ~ Antonia Perdu

Moms are life's number one cheerleaders without uniforms. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It's true, Christmas can feel like a lot of work, particularly for mothers. But when you look back on all the Christmases in your life, you'll find you've created family traditions and lasting memories. Those memories, good and bad, are really what help to keep a family together over the long haul. ~ Caroline Kennedy

Mothers are the fountain of creation ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

On Mother's Day, I like to feel pampered. I like to feel celebrated. I like to feel honored. I like to feel glamorous. ~ Tia Mowry

Maggie had learned a long time ago that each day with a child was filled with two kinds of battles: those that won the war, and those that did not. ~ Sydney Strand

I could do anything - be anything.
I could be a blackberry farmer.
I could worry about phone bills and nipping out to the corner shop for milk and bread of a morning.
Little Declan Jr. could learn to walk and talk with his real father, alive and well, and I could teach him how to wear a waistcoat with just the right amount of tragic charm, take him to school in a few years, maybe makehim a little sister to look out for, someone to keep him on his toes. He could play a sport - tennis, maybe, or football. I'd attend parent-teacher meetings and have after-work drinks with the neighbors, talking about how well so-and-so is doing, and why yes, Declan Jr. is learning to play the piano. Top of his class, you know - he has his mother's grace…
I could see all of that, as clear in my mind as sunlight on fresh snow, and so much more.
Just living day to day. One morning we could have picnics, my family and I, next to blue glacial lakes. One afternoon my son would be old enough to meet a girl, get in a fight, need to shave. One evening his sister will need help with her homework, and he'll complain, but he'll help.
And then one day the Elder Gods would descend from a blood-red sky in chariots lashed together from bone and flame and take away all my blackberries. ~ Joe Ducie