My Mother Quotes

My mother always said you could eat off her floor; you could eat of my floor too, there's so much food down there. ~ Elayne Boosler

I guessed my mother figured if my father got right down to the task of eating he wouldn't be so inclined to jump up and strangle my grandmother. ~ Janet Evanovich

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. ~ Fred Rogers

But I killed a man just like my mother did. David says it's okay because I didn't mean to, and because he was about to kill that little kid. But I'm pretty sure my mom didn't mean to kill my dad, either, so what difference does that make, meaning or not meaning to do something? Accident or on purpose, the result is the same, and that's one fewer life than there should be in the world. ~ Veronica Roth

My mother and I looked at each other then, full in the face, more frankly than we'd done since I was small. I realized with a jolt that I was taller than she was by at least half a foot. When on earth had that happened? The realization made me want to sit down on the stairs and cry. It seemed to signify something terrible about the world: something that couldn't - or mustn't- be put into words. And I could see, looking down into her startled, anxious face, that my mother felt exactly the same way. ~ John Wray

How can you love me if you don't even know me?" He lifted my arms around his neck and placed his hands on the small of my back.
"I know you, Jade. You're witty and stubborn, like when you wanted to get rid of me at the bar in San Diego. And you're sweet and caring, like when you talked to my mother at the hospital. And you can drink like a sailor. " He chuckled. "And you hardly ever blush, but when you do it's like the sunshine." Then, he whispered in my ear with a husky voice, "And you make love with your soul."
Peter gave my earlobe a quick nibble. "I couldn't care less about energy. It might have brought us together, but I only care about you. I want to spend the rest of my days with you; no matter if it'll be ten or ten thousand."
Despite myself, I felt my eyes burn from tears I wasn't ready to shed.
Still, I couldn't say it.
"Peter..." I kissed him with all the tenderness I found in my heart and said, "the tub is about to
spill."
"Oh, shit." He jerked away from me, turned the water off and unplugged the tub, then hugged
me again with wet hands. "All we need is time, Jade. You'll see this love is real. ~ Denyse Cohen

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I. ~ Doris Lessing

On my family: My mother buries her grief in her work. Having no work, grief buries me. ~ Suzanne Collins

I go to bed with horror on my wings. In my pillow is sad comforts. Like my mother says, 'On essaye a s'y prendre, pi sa travaille pas' (We try to manage, and it turns out shit). ~ Jack Kerouac

My father knew the charming side of my mother, and my mother thought that he was attentive and pleasant and was an architect, which was a respectable profession, but I don't think that they actually got to know one another deeply. ~ Christopher Durang

Well, Jack, we have taken the Macedonian, and your share of the prize, if we get her in safely, may be two hundred dollars; what will you do with it?" Stephen Decatur, commanding the frigate United States, North Atlantic, near the Azores Islands, 1812.

"One hundred will go to my mother, sir, and the other I shall spend on schooling." Jack Creamer, aged ten. ~ Irvin Anthony

I do chat to my mother in Norwegian, particularly when we want a secret conversation. It is useful that way. ~ Alexander Hanson

I admire my mother. She raised four kids and worked and had no help. ~ Jane Leeves

A very good friend of mine, Michael Purser, once remarked that if my mother was the irresistible force, my father was surely the immovable object. Whatever the truth, I should not be here but for them. Being here is the supreme gift. ~ Julian Barbour

No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud. ~ Chris Gardner

Like, my mother would have company over, and I would sing so they'd pay attention to me. ~ Little Richard

I suddenly saw her quite differently. I saw that she was a person. Not my mother. She had thought it all out. She had wanted to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide. On that night I grew up. Or so I would like to believe. ~ Doris Lessing

The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself. ~ Nancy Friday

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. ~ Philip Levine

Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out. ~ Ian McEwan

My mother told me I was dancing before I was born. She could feel my toes tapping wildly inside her for months. ~ Ginger Rogers

A pretty woman is a Christmas tree,' my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor. ~ Joshilyn Jackson

Was it pretty? Your country ... your land?" "It was beautiful," the gunslinger said. "There were fields and forests and rivers and mists in the morning. But that's only pretty. My mother used to say that the only real beauty is order and love and light. ~ Stephen King

I'll never forget my first time with you' Min said as she edged the doughnut off her finger. 'The earth moved, and then my mother asked my father who he was going down on at lunch. ~ Jennifer Crusie

But we survived, and we're a good family. I just don't want to dedicate one more tear, or watch my mother cry one more time. ~ Angelina Jolie

[My mother] once cooked a ham and later found it in my father's shirt drawer. I am not kidding. ~ Dick Van Dyke

My mother is so full of joy and life. I am her child. And that is better than being the child of anyone else in the world. ~ Maya Angelou

My mother was a politician in my formative years. ~ Antonia Fraser

Who do you look like?" I laugh.

"No one. My father used to joke that my mother must have had an affair with the milkman. ~ Amy Ewing

I have a lot of older brothers who messed up in different ways in my mother's eyes. So I learned from all of their mistakes. I can't go into detail, but while I was growing up, I always tried to make it a goal to relieve some of the stress my mother went through. ~ Kellan Lutz

I hear my father; I need never fear.
I hear my mother; I shall never be lonely, or want for love.
When I am hungry it is they who provide for me; when I am in dismay, it is they who fill me with comfort.
When I am astonished or bewildered, it is they who make the weak ground firm beneath my soul: it is in them that I put my trust.
When I am sick it is they who send for the doctor; when I am well and happy, it is in their eyes that I know best that I am loved; and it is towards the shining of their smiles that I lift up my heart and in their laughter that I know my best delight.
I hear my father and my mother and they are my giants, my king and my queen, beside whom there are not others so wise or worthy or honorable or brave or beautiful in this world.
I need never fear: nor ever shall I lack for loving-kindness. ~ James Agee

Oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.
I am almost the dead woman's age times two.
I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother's calling,
her young voice humming my name. ~ Lucille Clifton

I had a sense that my mother was struggling, when I was a kid, working twelve hour days, making $12,000 a year with two kids in a trailer park. ~ Cecily McMillan

Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That's the first important thing I ever found out I didn't find out from my mother. ~ Stephen King

She did not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her, and I felt towards her something I have never felt for any other human being ~ Charles Dickens

OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT. Cut out my father. Cut out my mother. Cut out missing Ellis. Cut out the man in the underpass, cut out Fucking Frank, the men downstairs; the people on the street with too many people inside them, cut out hungry, and sad and tired, and being nobody and unpretty and unloved, just cut it all out, get smaller and smaller until I was nothing. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only knew the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother. ~ Rebecca Wells

My mother always called me 'sturdy' and said I have big bones. A little fat is what I am. ~ Andy Rooney

Somebody ripped their pants open at my wedding, dipping my mother. My mother is not a lady who throws herself into a dip that often, so I don't think he thought she was really going to do it. ~ Melissa McCarthy

When I came home and showed my mother my report card with a mark of 98 in arithmetic, she wanted to know who had gotten the other two points. ~ Sam Levenson

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

I cried to my mother that I wanted to go to Hebrew school; I wanted Jewish friends. But when my mother took me, the kids there all knew each other, and somehow I was even more of an outcast. ~ Caroline Leavitt

For somebody to take a shot at him is totally disappointing and hurtful to my family, my mother, his wife and child. For Dianne to say we turned our back on her or nobody helped her. I paid Randy's bonus in '04. I paid him six months in '05. She got a BMW. I paid her insurance. When you attack my family personally when we've done everything we can, I was very disappointed in Diane and I thought it was uncalled for and inaccurate. ~ Rick Hendrick

My mother got pregnant with me at the age of fifteen. This was '64, and unheard of at that time. ~ Dr. Dre

I would hit a scene about my mother screaming at me during her breakdown, drunk or using pills, and she'd turn into a monster. Which she wasn't. She was a human: somebody who loved me and somebody with a problem. ~ Leigh Newman

My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-'60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also 'sold' ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States. ~ Andrei Codrescu

More Latin? I was going to need a fucking guidebook to keep track of a language I thought was as dead as my mother. ~ T.J. Klune

I've always had this female-empowerment thing in the back of my mind - because I wanted my mother to be stronger, and she couldn't be. ~ Nicki Minaj

Today i solved a problem my mother knew nothing about," Estrella said. Her words twisted, each one sounding harder, like a knot tightening. "She still doesn't. I fixed it, and she had no idea. My mother, all our mothers, they think they're holding everything up, but we have it too. It's ours too. So forget what my nother thinks i should or shouldn't be doing because we're going and getting some damn cotton candy, okay? ~ Anna-Marie McLemore

I remember my mother saying to me on one occasion, 'Mel, I know that I can count on you.' I resolved that she would always be able to count on me. I would not let her down. I loved her too much. Her confidence in me meant everything. Today I still feel that way. I feel that way about the Brethren. I don't ever want to let President Hinckley or any of the other leaders of the Church down. But, even more important, I never want to let the Savior down, because I love Him more than anything else. ~ F. Melvin Hammond

I say to my mother all the time, 'You're the child.' And she says, 'Yeah, you're the mother.' I've been that way with her since I was 11. ~ Kristy McNichol

My father, obviously, and my mother were inspirations. My uncle, Frank Harper, he was an absolute mentor for me. ~ Hill Harper

Did you see him? I know the photo was grainy, but he looks like one of those death metal goth heads, or whatever they're called. All dressed in black with long hair
I took umbrage at my mother describing my boyfriend this way. John was the Lord of the Underworld. How else was he supposed to dress? ~ Meg Cabot

It once amused me that it took me three tries to pass my driver's test and that my driving instructor told my mother that I was the least talented person behind the wheel that she had ever taught. ~ Jane Smiley

Nathan Sutter," the teacher read. Here. My mother never calls me Nathan." Is it Nate?" She calls me Honeylips. ~ Brandon Mull

I have hair in places monkeys dont.While giving birth my mother almost dies from rug burn. ~ Jim Rose

I had to come out to my mother three times over a twelve-year period, but I first came out to her when I was sixteen. It didn't go over so well, because I grew up in the Pentecostal Church. It was a very strict environment. She has since done a lot of work and has really blown my mind. She has learned about my life and has changed her mind. ~ Billy Porter

I'm just proud that I created something that helped me pay my bills because I was so flat broke. I was borrowing money from my mother to stay afloat, and that was kind of uncomfortable. ~ Marc Cherry

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

A person like me who has grown up in a mixed culture ought to be spiritual. My mother is a Catholic, my father is a Muslim, and my wife is a Hindu. Personally, I feel spirituality is about being clear-hearted. It involves a sense of connection with the divine. ~ Emraan Hashmi

Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do. ~ Julia Glass

It is a sunny fall afternoon and I'm engaged in one of my favorite pastimes - picking chestnuts. I'm playing alone under the spreading, leafy, protective tree. My mother is sitting on a bench nearby, rocking the buggy in which my sister is asleep. The city, beyond the lacy wall of trees, is humming with gentle noises. The sun has just passed its highest point and is warming me with intense, oblique rays. I pick up a reddish brown chestnut, and suddenly, through its warm skin, I feel the beat as if of a heart. But the beat is also in everything around me, and everything pulsates and shimmers as if it were coursing with the blood of life. Stooping under the tree, I'm holding life in my hand, and I am in the center of a harmonious, vibrating transparency. For that moment, I know everything there is to know. I have stumbled into the very center of plenitude, and I hold myself still with fulfillment, before the knowledge of my knowledge escapes me. ~ Eva Hoffman

In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. ~ Barack Obama

I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

My mother has been moved out of intensive care and into a private room where she is being kept comfortable. Thank you for your continued support. ~ Melissa Rivers

My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother. ~ Al Pacino

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife. ~ Alice Hoffman

It was deeply interesting to observe my mother closely and to draw her. During those last months, she wasn't speaking much, if at all, and it was a way for me to be with her. It felt very natural. ~ Roz Chast

My mother, she didn't believe in praise. She'd never say anything was great. I think that's quite Northern, to not make people feel too good. I didn't mind if she was proud of me or not, it didn't bother me. I was never trying to please her. ~ Victoria Wood

My mother did not want cancer to interfere with my life, as she knew it would eventually end hers. ~ Jenna Morasca

I was raised to believe that God has a plan for everyone and that seemingly random twists of fate are all a part of His plan. My mother - a small woman with auburn hair and a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos - told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God's Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. If something went wrong, she said, you didn't let it get you down: You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and moved on. Later on, she added, something good will happen and you'll find yourself thinking - If I hadn't had that problem back then, then this better thing that did happen wouldn't have happened to me. ~ Ronald Reagan

She gave Samuel a stern look. "Now, I don't know what's going on between you and my daughter and Adam Hauptman - "
"Neither do we," I muttered.
Samuel grinned. "We have it pretty well worked out as far as the sex goes - Adam gets it - someday - and I don't. But the rest is still up for negotiation."
"Samuel Cornick," I sputtered in disbelief. "That is my mother. ~ Patricia Briggs

When my mother wanted to teach me a lesson about life,' said Luca Dotti, 'she never used stories about her career. She always told stories about the war. The war was very, very important to her. It made her who she was. ~ Robert Matzen

I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.

Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I'd love to say it all turned out great. It didn't. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

My mother tried to kill me when I was a baby. She denied it. She said she thought the plastic bag would keep me fresh. ~ Bob Monkhouse

My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right. ~ Ruth Reichl

As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job. ~ Jane Goodall

I love J. F. K. My mother had been a worker on his campaign and adored him. ~ Tim Matheson

My daddy died when I was two years old. My mother raised my two older brothers and me. And we couldn't have had a better situation. I mean, she was the - ran the concession stand at the Little League, and she was the first woman president of The Touchdown Club, the booster club for the high school football team. And so, I had a wonderful childhood. ~ Haley Barbour

Hard as I fought for it to be otherwise, finally I had to admit it too: without my mother, we weren't what we'd been; we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief, connected by only the thinnest rope. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Every call to worship is a call into the Real World ... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

My love of storytelling comes from oral tradition, the stories from my grandmother and conversations with [my] mother. The world is full of discussions of condensation, drifts, misunderstanding, repetition. These are the materials I work with. My debt is to these women. ~ Lucrecia Martel

She's right, of course. My mother usually is. She's a librarian. ~ Heather Vogel Frederick

I idolized my mother. I didn't realize she was a lousy cook until I went into the army. ~ Jackie Gayle

My mother raised me to be bold. If I do not go, I will spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had."
"If you do go, the rest of your life may be too short for wondering. - Asha & Rodrick ~ George R R Martin

What kind of woman tells all her secrets?" my mother continued, flabbergasted and disappointed in me. "Especially anything that has to do with your body making babies! I know a woman who had no ovaries when she got married. Her husband found out only years later that they couldn't have children. The two of them are happy together still; they live in a big house, and have a cute dog. ~ Inna Swinton

When Jan was called up to service a fourth time...my mother waited outside...the two of them were convinced that this time Jan would have to go, that they would surely send him off to cure his ailing chest in the air of France, famed for its iron and lead content. ~ Gunter Grass

My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again. ~ Thomas Merton

My first vivid memory is ... when first I looked into her face and she looked into mine. That I do remember, and that exchanging looks I have carried with me all of my life. We recognized each other. I was her child and she was my mother. ~ Pearl S. Buck

Here is my mother, with wings instead of hands, and feathers instead of hair. Here is my mother, the reddest of brilliant reds, the color of my love and my fear, all of my fiercest feelings trailing after her in the sky like the tail of a comet. ~ Emily X.R. Pan

I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful. ~ Tracy K. Smith

Utensil

While feasting
On venison stew
After we buried my mother,
I recognized my spoon

And realized my family
Had been using it
For at least forty-two years.
How does one commemorate

The ordinary? I thanked
The spoon for being a spoon
And finished my stew.
How does one get through

A difficult time? How does
A son properly mourn his mother?
It helps to run the errands--
To get shit done. I washed

That spoon, dried it,
And put it back
In the drawer,
But I did it consciously,

Paying attention
To my hands, my wrists,
And the feel of steel
Against my fingertips.

Then my wife drove us back
Home to Seattle, where I wrote
This poem about ordinary
Grief. Thank you, poem,

For being a poem. Thank you,
Paper and ink, for being paper
And ink. Thank you, desk,
For being a desk. Thank you,

Mother, for being my mother.
Thank you for your imperfect love.
It almost worked. It mostly worked.
Or partly worked. It was almost enough. ~ Sherman Alexie

I've always valued the input of the people I love. So in the past, whenever I'd make a decision - what to wear to an event, whether to pursue a job opportunity - I'd consult those closest to me, like my mother, husband, or manager. ~ Alicia Keys

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything
for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes. ~ Alice Sebold

I learnt to sing in Bengali, my mother tongue, then went on to sing in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and every possible Indian language. ~ Shreya Ghoshal

When I told my mother that I wanted to be an actress, she said, you can't live here and do that, and so I moved out. I was determined to prove her wrong because she was so sure that I was going to go astray. And that's the juice that kept me going. ~ Cicely Tyson

I was four when I started learning Music. I still remember my first vocal class where I tried telling my mother that I can never get it right. I am glad she made me stick with it because she already knew what makes me happy even before I did. And eventually I realize, that everyone has that point in life where we hit crossroads, had bunch of bad days and there's different ways to deal with it. And the way I dealt with it was I just turned to Music. ~ Manasa Rao

My mother never finished elementary school. My father didn't, and that was a reality for many of us. ~ Ruben Blades

My mother and grandmother both had beautiful skin. ~ Andie MacDowell