Greatest Mothers Day Quotes

Acceptance, tolerance, bravery, compassion. These are the things my mom taught me. ~ Lady Gaga

Thank you for this precious day,
These gifts you give to me,
My heart so full of love for you,
Sings praise for all I see,
Oh, sing, for every mother's love,
For every childhood tear,
Oh, sing, for all the stars above,
The peace beyond all fear ~ John Denver

It takes a Mother's Patience, to bring a child up right, And her Courage and her Cheerfulness to make a dark day bright. ~ Helen Steiner Rice

Lilah did little more than sleep and eat and cry, which to me was the most fascinating thing in the entire universe. Why did she cry? When did she sleep? What made her eat a lot one day and little the next? Was she changing with time? I did what any obsessed person would do in such a case: I recorded data, plotted it, calculated statistical correlations. First I just wrote on scraps of paper and made charts on graph paper, but I very quickly became more sophisticated. I wrote computer software to make a beautifully colored plot showing times when Diane fed Lilah, in black; when I fed her, in blue (expressed mother's milk, if you must know); Lilah's fussy times, in angry red; her happy times, in green. I calculated patterns in sleeping times, eating times, length of sleep, amounts eaten.
Then, I did what any obsessed person would do these days; I put it all on the Web. ~ Mike Brown

Eva will be impressed, too. Bet you're counting on that heading into the weekend." Damn right. I would need all the points I could earn when I met up with Eva in San Diego. "She's about to go out of town. And you have to head into the conference room before they get too restless in there. I'll join you as soon as I can." He stood. "Yes, I heard. Your mother's here. Let the wedding insanity begin. Since you're free this weekend, how about we round up some of the usual suspects at my place tonight? It's been a while, and your bachelor days are numbered. Well, technically they're over, but no one else knows that." And he was bound by attorney-client privilege. It took me a beat to decide. "All right. What time?" "Eight-ish." I nodded, then caught Scott's eye. He got ~ Sylvia Day

If you have no arms

To hold your crying child but your own arms

And no legs but your own to run the stairs one more time

To fetch what was forgotten

I bow to you

If you have no vehicle

To tote your wee one but the wheels that you drive

And no one else to worry, "Is my baby okay?"

When you have to say goodbye on the doorsteps of daycare

or on that cursed first day of school

I bow to you

If you have no skill but your own skill

To replenish an ever-emptying bank account

And no answers but your own to

Satisfy the endless whys, hows, and whens your child asks and asks again

I bow to you

If you have no tongue to tell the truth

To keep your beloved on the path without a precipice

And no wisdom to impart

Except the wisdom that you've acquired

I bow to you

If the second chair is empty

Across the desk from a scornful, judging authority waiting

For your child's father to appear

And you straighten your spine where you sit

And manage to smile and say, "No one else is coming - I'm it."

Oh, I bow to you

If your head aches when the spotlight finally shines

on your child because your hands are the only hands there to applaud

I bow to you

If your heart aches because you ~ Toni Sorenson

Children love their mothers. Especially with a boy child and his mother, there's a bond that's unbreakable. I love my mother to this day. ~ Tyler Perry

Death and the Turtle"

I watched the turtle dwindle day by day,
Get more remote, lie limp upon my hand;
When offered food he turned his head away;
The emerald shell grew soft. Quite near the end
Those withdrawn paws stretched out to grasp
His long head in a poignant dying gesture.
It was so strangely like a human clasp,
My heart cracked for the brother creature.

I buried him, wrapped in a lettuce leaf,
The vivid eye sunk inward, a dull stone.
So this was it, the universal grief:
Each bears his own end knit up in the bone.
Where are the dead? we ask, as we hurtle
Toward the dark, part of this strange creation,
One with each limpet, leaf, and smallest turtle---
Cry out for life, cry out in desperation!

Who will remember you when I have gone,
My darling ones, or who remember me?
Only in our wild hearts the dead live on.
Yet these frail engines bound to mystery
Break the harsh turn of all creation's wheel,
for we remember China, Greece, and Rome,
Our mothers and our fathers, and we steal
From death itself its rich store, and bring it home. ~ May Sarton

I grew up missing my mom while she was right in front of me. ~ Maggie Young

Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of. ~ Amy Tan

I remember, on one occasion, her praying thus: "Now, Lord, if my children go on in their sins, it will not be from ignorance that they perish, and my soul must bear a swift witness against them at the day of judgment if they lay not hold of Christ." That thought of a mother's bearing swift witness against me, pierced my conscience, and stirred my heart. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Everyday I've got is my Mother's Day! ~ Mohith Agadi

The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead
young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is
no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back.
They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their
jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, "How is it with you, my
child?" but always, lest a strange face should frighten him, they
whisper it so low that he may not hear. They bend over him to
see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet arm beneath
the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many little
vests he has. They love to do these things.

What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their
child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him,
and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to
room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate
souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that
go wailing about old houses, and foolish wild stories are
invented to explain what is all so pathetic and simple. I know
of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early home to
pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair
by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face
appear. She always looked at him very vindictively, and then
vanished. Strange things happened in this house. Windows were < ~ J.M. Barrie

Fanfare for the Makers

A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?
To the small fire that never leaves the sky.
To the great fire that boils the daily pot.

To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not notice when we die,

Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.

So fanfare for the Makers: who compose
A book of words or deeds who runs may write
As many who do run, as a family grows

At times like sunflowers turning towards the light.
As sometimes in the blackout and the raids
One joke composed an island in the night.

As sometimes one man's kindness pervades
A room or house or village, as sometimes
Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades

Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes
At midnight means to share them, as one man
In old age plants an avenue of limes

And before they bloom can smell them, before they span
The road can walk beneath the perfected arch,
The merest greenprint when the lives began

Of those who walk there with him, as in default
Of coffee men grind acorns, as in despite
Of all assaults conscripts counter assault,

As mothers sit up late night after night
Moulding a life, as miners day by day
Descend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kite

In an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers play
The ~ Louis MacNeice

[My mom] had this amazing attitude in the face of everything, including when she got cancer. ~ William J. Clinton

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a cu ~ David Foster Wallace

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

I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life. ~ Abraham Lincoln

I think the biggest reason I was able to express myself and not be intimidated was by not having a mother. For example, mothers teach you manners. And I absolutely did not learn any of those rules and regulations. ~ Madonna Ciccone

So while it is great to celebrate on a day dedicated to moms, I urge each of you, to ALWAYS be good to the woman who is so good to you. Honor your mothers EVERY DAY by letting her know she is the real MVP in your life. ~ Carlos Wallace

If you sent me to cover a pie-baking contest on Mother's Day, I'm going to ask dear old Mom why she used artificial sweetener or stole the apples! ~ Sam Donaldson

Tender are a mother's dreams, But her babe's not what he seems. See him plotting in his mind To grow up some other kind. ~ Clarence Day

Milkers don't spend half as long with their mothers." Eli spread his chore coat over Little Joe. "Not more than a few weeks. Sometimes one day. Maybe not even ... If you were a peeper, it'd be even worse. They don't even get to see their mamas. They're still jelly beans when they're left alone to hatch. ~ Sandra Neil Wallace

It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men's theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother's influence. Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children's needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is mother's influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child's basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother's loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother's influence and teaching in the home - and how apparent when neglected! ~ Ezra Taft Benson

I remember lying on the beach that afternoon, looking at Audrey while trying at the same time not to look because I knew if she caught me she'd turn away. I remember wondering if I had been that way with my own mother once, always distant, always trying to disappear, always dismissing her, she who had held me in her womb and squeezed me out. How ungrateful we all once were, we daughters who become mothers only to learn how it feels, the endless cycle of rejection. I remember thinking about my mother that day, wishing I could tell her how sorry I was. ~ Laurie Foos

Bagpipe Music'

It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction'.

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caugh ~ Louis MacNeice

I've played a lot of mothers in my movies. ~ Vera Farmiga

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

Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.'

I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.

But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was ali ~ Jeanette Winterson

I realize that i've seen French mothers and nannies pausing exactly this little bit before tending to their babies during the day. It hadn't occurred to me that this was deliberate or that it was at all significant. ~ Pamela Druckerman

There never was a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and brave as a lioness ... The memory of my mother and her teachings were, after all, the only capital I had to start life with, and on that capital I have made my way. ~ Andrew Jackson

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother. ~ Abraham Lincoln

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

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

Because there is no such thing as an "almost" mother. Seven bouquets from your seven angels. Happy Mother's Day, Princess. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

Motherhood furnishes us with, not just giving life - but, partaking of life's learning. ~ Eleesha

The Staging

In the weeks after my mother's death, I sleep
Four or five hours a night, often interrupted
By dreams, and take two or three naps a day.

It seems like enough. I can survive if I keep
This sleep schedule as it has been constructed
For me. But if it seems my reflexes are delayed,

Or if I sway when I walk, or weep or do not weep,
Please don't worry. I'm not under destruction.
My grief has cast me in a lethargic cabaret.

So pay the cover charge and take your seat.
This mourning has become a relentless production
And I've got seventy-eight roles to play. ~ Sherman Alexie

For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout's gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller's property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.
And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death - but kindness? ~ Hanya Yanagihara

From then on, right up to this day, I fear that I walk funny, in other words, that I walk like a woman. When I find myself walking at my own pace, I almost immediately slow down. And I learned what men do not do. They do not wet their dry lips by running their tongues over them. They don't trot after their mothers into the kitchen. They don't use face powder. They don't sit on a motorbike behind a woman. They don't need mirrors in the rooms where they might change their clothes. On trips, they can go behind a tree. They don't even need an enclosed space to take a dump; they can do it in the open. They shouldn't be afraid of other people seeing their bodies. If there's only one bathroom, they can bathe in the open. When caned in class, they do not cry. They do not buy tamarind from the lady who sells it on the road and they certainly do not sit by her side and eat it. ~ Sachin Kundalkar

God, He didn't write the scripts for the puny little players down
here.
We wrote them ourselves-with each day we lived, each word we spoke,
each thought we etched on our brains. And Momma had written her
script, too.
And a sorry one it was. ~ V.C. Andrews

Mother's Day, like motherhood itself, is fraught with peril. There are so many ways to get it wrong, so many opportunities to disappoint and be disappointed. ~ Meghan Daum

This heart, my own dear mother, bends,
With love's true instinct, back to thee! ~ Thomas Moore

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