Mother Daughter Relationship Quotes

Though auditing a class at the Sorbonne taught by Luce Irigaray and titled The Mother-Daughter Relationship: The Darkest of Dark Continents, Claire had followed maternal example by setting out guest towels. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Mothers are programmed to teach the fit. They are unequipped to listen to pleas, to alter their patterns. Mothers know how to nurse and nurture those who they have hope for - they coo over babies with infections they can help heal, they give advice for things they know, they protect from the dangers they know how to fear. But once their baby becomes so hurt the mother doesn't know how to heal her, she neglects because she doesn't know better. The tricks she knows don't work, she fears, and, eventually, when she is so lost she feels hopeless, she abandons. ~ Aspen Matis

If you are told from the time you are one month that you're no good and you're not smart and you can't do it and you don't have an opinion of your own and you pick the wrong friends and you don't study the right way and you don't wear the right clothes and you don't look nice, at some point you're going to start believing it. And if you believe it, you're going to need a mommy to tell you what to do. And that's abuse. Not to let your child grow up to be an independent, respected human being. ~ Victoria Secunda

If unloving mothers were able to see their behavious as abusive, they either would stop behaving that way or they would get help for their dysfunction. But many cannot: instead, they deny it, to themselves, their families, and the world at large, in order to avoid a sense of guilt, to avoid having to make changes in their lives, or to avoid the bruising awareness that they, too, were unloved children. ~ Victoria Secunda

The weaving of life between mother and daughter is just like the making of a basket. As time goes by, the interlacing takes shape and becomes stronger. ~ Haley Elizabeth Garwood

They both began to giggle and then they fell into a side splitting round of laughter, the cleansing, complete sort of laughter only a mother and daughter can share. ~ Karen Kingsbury

Another step is that daughters can learn to monitor their own feelings and instincts by saying, "I feel uncomfortable (angry, dominated, usurped, inadequate, guilty, furious) with my mother more often than I do not. I have to pay attention to that, because it shows in how I treat my friends (lover, spouse, kids, colleagues). There is validity here. I don't have to blame or excuse my mother-I just have to see her so I can see myself. ~ Victoria Secunda

I always had the sense that nothing was never good enough - striving for perfection. My mother and I had a sort of typical mother-daughter relationship. ~ Dorothy Hamill

Here was what I wanted to happen when I walked through the door after my first real date and my first ever kiss. I wanted my mom to say, "Dear God, Meg, you're glowing. Sit and tell me about this boy. He let you borrow his jacket? That's so adorable." Instead, I came off the high of that day by writing a letter to my dead brother and doing yoga between my twin beds, trying to forget my absent mother. ~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Winning is a matter of endurance. As long as you don't quit, you will win! ~ E.V. Frapiere

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom's voice came to me, repeating things she'd said for months. Like, "My skin is melting off my face, isn't it?" And, "My whole body feels dead from the crap they're pouring into me. Do I look green to you?" And, "When I'm naked, I can see my heart beating. ~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Emily and I have some funny scenes where we quarrel and it gets quite heated, the mother-daughter relationship. You know, film mothers and daughters adore each other. And some don't. But how could you not love Emily Blunt? But I think I'm just one of those people who's always discontented. ~ Jacki Weaver

I was playing a new part in a new play: the messed-up adult child coming home in a truly pitiful state in the back of her parents' luxury sedan.
It was a glorious suburban homecoming. ~ Inna Swinton

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous. ~ Anna Quindlen

Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter screams, 'You don't understand, and you'll never understand!' The mother stamps her foot in aggravation, but in this case the daughter is right: the mother doesn't understand. She merely remembers, and memory is separate from experience. ~ Caitlin Flanagan

With every movie I produce, I learn something. I watch the directors. It's like the relationship you have with your children. I'm there to learn from my daughters. They are the perfect spirits. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa's forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. What? ~ David Mitchell

You want something enough that you're going to hurt, then you stay, and keep it. ~ Sam Crescent

All I know is that once you have children, you put them before anything you're feeling or going through. Today, my daughter walked into the room and I said, 'I love you, baby,' and she said, 'Well, I don't like you,' and I said to my wife, 'The meaner she is to me, the more I love her.' ~ Jeremy Sisto

Sacrifice," The Captain said. "You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost.
You didn't get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. ~ Mitch Albom

If you want to ask about my drug problem, go ask my big, fat, smart, ten pound daughter, she'll answer any questions you have about it. ~ Courtney Love

Something wild was going on in that coffin ... .I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn't me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life? And then she realized- That was her. Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers. ~ Laura Kasischke

Camille's eyes fluttered and then closed. The cake was warm and her fork went down again. "Oh," she said quietly.
There was a time I cared: a meat, a vegetable, a starch, some cake. Life had an order, but now the point only seemed to be eating. Here was my daughter, eating, devouring, she was almost through with the cake.
"Did you make this with honey?" Camille asked. There was something in her voice I nearly recognized. It sounded like interest, kindness.
"I did."
"Because sometimes-" She couldn't finish her sentence without stopping for another bite. "You use brown sugar?"
"It's another recipe."
"I like the honey."
"The problems they're having with bees these days," Sam began, but I held up my hand and it silenced him. There was too much pleasure in the moment to hear about the plight of the bees.
My mother took a long, last sip of her drink and then went to the counter to get the cake, the knife, and three more plates. "First the two of you are having a drink on a Tuesday, now we're all eating cake before we finish our dinner." She cut four pieces and gave the first one to Camille, whose plate was empty.
"It's madness. Anarchy. It must make you wonder what's coming next," Sam said.
My mother handed me my plate. I don't eat that much cake, but I never turn down a slice.
The four of us ate, pretending it was a salad course. Camille was right to pick up on the honey. It was the undertone, the melody of the cake. It was no ~ Jeanne Ray

I think a dad has to make his daughter feel that he's genuinely interested in what she's going through. ~ Harry Connick, Jr.

Oh, is that right? You know, a lioness will protect her cub by baring her teeth, by roaring, using her claws to defend her cub if she feels she has to - this mother, has other means. You are standing in the way of my daughter's best interests. If you try to pick our peach from our family tree, you will be picking a fight. Do you understand me? ~ Steven L. Sheppard

The mother and daughter whose roles had reversed - Grandma gladly relinquishing parental responsibility, my mother grimly accepting the task, struggling to find a place for an old woman who'd suddenly become a strange hybrid of tolerant mother and rebellious daughter. My father, in the living room, not wanting any part of it. ~ Janet Evanovich

By the grace of God, my parents were fantastic. We were a very normal family, and we have had a very middle-class Indian upbringing. We were never made to realise who we were or that my father and mother were huge stars - it was a very normal house, and I'd like my daughter to have the same thing. ~ Abhishek Bachchan

Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

No man who respects his mother or loves his sister, can speak disparagingly of any woman; however low she may seem to have sunk, she is still a woman. I want every man to remember this. Every woman is, or, at some time, has been a sister or daughter ... ~ Victoria Woodhull

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

You'll have lots of adventures in the future, and goodbyes will come with lots of them. The ones who love you will take pride in sending you on those adventures...And if one day, you do set off on all those adventures you imagine for yourself, I'll be proud to have raised a daughter who's brave enough to have followed her dreams. I promise ~ Amie Kaufman

This is how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; ~ Jamaica Kincaid

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT PAGE:

To my daughter,
if you ever date anyone like the men I write,

I will kick your *ss up between your ears and you will walk sideways for a month,

but I'll still love you. ~ Amelia Hutchins

I began for the first time to really understand the loss my adoptive mother must have felt from not having her own child. I was terribly sad for her and realized that she had missed out greatly - we both had - and there was nothing I could do to change that. I could never be her natural daughter and I could never make her feel better about that loss. Guilt is a strange waste of time in the cold light of day. ~ Zara Phillips

Awful to think she was a disapproving mother. Awful to wonder-had she always frightened Amy? Is that why the girl had grown up so fearful, always ducking her head? It was bewildering to Isablle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious. But it was a terrible feeling. More terrible than having Avery Clark forget to come to her house. Knowing that her child had grown up frightened. Except it was cockeyed, all backwards, because, thought Isabelle, glancing back at her daughter, I've been frightened of you. ~ Elizabeth Strout

I am a Grandmother, Mother, Aunt, Daughter, Niece, Wife and Sister, I am Every Woman. ~ Deborah Denise Johnson

I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father, she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think? ~ Jodi Picoult

I am also writing this for any man who wants to understand what a woman - a colleague, wife, mother, or daughter - is up against so that he can do his part to build an equal world. This ~ Sheryl Sandberg

I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter - if she'd lived, as I'd grown older). ~ Margaret Atwood

I obviously want to give a healthy body image to my own daughter. I think having good examples, eating properly, that's all one can do - and just be really loving around her. I've tried to give her confidence in who she is. I think she's all right in the confidence department. ~ Geri Halliwell

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

My daughter's name is Neesyn Dacey but everyone calls her Dacey. Her mom chose Neesyn and I chose Dacey after she was born. The mother is a good friend of mine who I was seeing a while ago. We are no longer together. ~ Bode Miller

There was something about him that had always rubbed her the wrong way. Before her mother's death, she [Shiara] could remember her saying that he was a nice enough young man, but not the one for her daughter. ~ J.C. Morrows

As a teenage daughter hears her sweet mother plead unto the Lord that her daughter will be inspired in the selection of her companions, that she will prepare herself for a temple marriage, don't you believe that such a daughter will seek to honor this humble, pleading petition of her mother, whom she so dearly loves? ~ Thomas S. Monson

No one wants to learn an instrument, Rachel. It's grueling repetition. And besides, you're too old to start. Concert violinists who learn the traditional way begin when they're six or seven."
Risa can't help but listen to the irritating conversation taking place between the well-dressed woman and her fashionably disheveled teenage daughter.
"It's bad enough they'd be messing in my brain and giving me a NeuroWeave," the girl whines. "But why do I have to have the hands, too? I like my hands!"
The mother laughs. "Honey, you've got your father's stubby, chubby little fingers. Trading up will only do you good in life, and it's common knowledge that a musical NeuroWeave requires muscle memory to complete the brain-body connection."
"There are no muscles in the fingers!" the girl announces triumphantly. "I learned that in school."
The mother gives her a long-suffering sigh.
"Think of them like a pair of gloves, Rachel. Fancy silk gloves, like a princess wears."
Risa can't stand it anymore. Making sure she's low enough so that her face can't be seen, she gets up, and as she walks past them, she says, "You'll have someone else's fingerprints. ~ Neal Shusterman

As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell's unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours' living room. ~ J.G. Ballard

There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures neatly divided into the fractions of an inch that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter or fidelity of a sister or the capacity of a housekeeper. ~ Virginia Woolf

But it isn't easy to find the right person. It would have to be someone good with kids and horses, and ho'd be able to pitch in with the administrating to some extent and wouldn't quibble about shoving manure.Plus I'd have to be able to depend on them, and get along with them. And they'd have to be diplomatic with parents, which is often the trickiest part."
Travis picked up his soft drink again. "I might be able to point you in the right direction there."
"Oh? Listen, Dad, I appreciate it, but you know, a friend of a friend or the son or daughter of an aquaintance. That kind of thing gets very sticky if it doesn't work out."
"Actually, I was thinking of someone a little closer to home.Your mother."
"Ma?" With a half laugh, Keeley sat again. "Ma doesn't want this headache, even if she had time for it."
"Shows what you know." Smug now, he drank. "Just mention it to her, casually. I won't say a word about it. ~ Nora Roberts

One cannot understand what's happening to women in the Middle East if they don't realize that the mothers are a strong, progressive force. The mothers push the daughters to get out of the harem, to get the education, to achieve what they could not even dream of. ~ Fatema Mernissi

Rules cease to exist once they have outlived their value, but forms live on eternally. There are forms of the novel which impose on the suggested topic all the virtues of the Number. Born of the very expression and of the diverse aspects of the tale, connected by nature with the guiding idea, daughter and mother of all the elements that it polarizes, a structure develops, which transmits to the works the last reflections of Universal Light and the last echoes of the Harmony of Worlds. ~ Raymond Queneau

I did not give my daughter the kind of childhood anybody would want. The vision of the divided loyalty between a mother and father who don't live together and don't share in decisions is a great depravation for children. ~ Gail Sheehy

First they ask me to tell the life of the child who is mother to the woman. Then they make me my own daughter and ask for an account of grown-up sensations. Finally I am requested to write about my dreams, and thus I become an anachronical grandmother; for it is the special privilege of old age to relate dreams. ~ Helen Keller

Once upon a time there was a widow who had two daughters. The elder was so much like her, both in looks and character, that whoever saw the daughter saw the mother. ~ Charles Perrault

The mother is only really the mistress of her daughter upon the condition of continually representing herself to her as a model of wisdom and type of perfection ~ Alexandre Dumas

Becoming a mother is the best thing that's happened to me. ~ Paula Patton

I am the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. My mother is a survivor of both polio and of the Igbo genocide during her country's civil war in the late 1960s. ~ Uzo Aduba