Narcissistic Mothers Quotes

Many [Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers] DONMs have a deeply buried sense that we are inherently flawed. That there is something twisted and evil and nasty and noxious and poisonous about us, and that we were born that way. It‟s part of who we are rather than just something we do. This brings with it a huge all-encompassing sense of shame. ~ Danu Morrigan

Daughters of narcissistic mothers absorb the message "I am valued for what I do, rather than for who I am. ~ Karyl McBride

When I was with my mother, I sometimes thought of myself of a trophy - something to be flaunted before friends. When out of public view, I sat on the shelf ignored and forgotten. ~ Joan Frances Casey

This sad, extreme example is more common than you might think. I have known daughters who felt tremendous relief when their narcissistic mothers passed away. They feel delivered out from under a huge burden, but guilty about admitting it. ~ Karyl McBride

Somehow I believed it was my obligation to try to do the right thing by her because she had given birth to me. ~ D.G. Kaye

motherless mothers with their skinless mysteries. ~ Edna O'Brien

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise
as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. ~ Allan Bloom

So let us sleep outside tonight, Lay down in our mother's arms, for here we can rest safely. ~ Dave Matthews

Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she's entirely right about that! ~ Booth Tarkington

Aye, but the hand that had murdered had once pressed the mother's breast into the thirsting mouth, had stolen into the father's hand when they went out into the dark. Aye, but the murderer afraid of death had once been a child afraid of the night. ~ Alan Paton

But why did my mother apportion the truth? Why did she tell me one version of history and tell another to my sister? I imagine my mother's pain and shame were so huge that she could only approach them piece by piece. I also think my mother was afraid to burden any of her children with the entire truth. My mother needed us to know. She needed to tell her story. But each of her children only got one piece--one chapter--of the book. I imagine my other siblings--and perhaps nieces, nephews, and cousins--were also given parts of my mother's most painful and truthful stories.

And, in this way, I recognize the way in which I have protected myself through the careful apportioning of secrets, of personal details, of emotions. I know how I reveal certain parts of myself only to certain groups of people. ~ Sherman Alexie

Happy Mother's Day! ~ LaNina King

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

Perverse times have come
The mystery of the Beloved to reveal

Crows have begun to hunt hawks,
Sparrows have vanquished falcons.
Horse browse on rubbish,
Donkeys graze on lush green.
No love is lost between relatives,
Be they younger or older uncles.

There is no accord between fathers and sons,
nor any between mothers and daughters.
The truthful ones are being pushed about,
the tricksters are seated close by,
the front-liners have become wretched,
the backbenchers sit on carpets.
Those in taters have turned into Kings,
The Kings have taken to begging.
Oh Bullah, comes the command from the Lord,
who can ever alter His decree?

Perverse times have come,
The mystery of the beloved to reveal ~ Bullhe Shāh

Mothers have to pretend to be perfect[.] If we didn't, anarchy would rule the world. But most of the time we're just doing the best we can and trying to get better at it everyday ~ Donna Ball

I do mean this - I had the good fortune of being around a number of Alzheimer's patients in the last three years of my mother's life. She was in a care facility that was devoted to just people with memory-loss issues. I found those people engaging and generous in ways that I had not imagined. ~ James Rebhorn

For many years, February was a difficult month for me after the death of my parents. My father died in February, just a week before my mother's birthday. For years their loss cast a pall over the month. I missed them terribly. But time has changed things. I see my father often in the face of my son and I run into my mother daily each time I pass the hall mirror. ~ Mary Morrell

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts ... it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us. ~ Henrik Ibsen

Close up she saw that Molina's eyes were beautiful and dark thik eye lashed the way Lisette's mother tried to make hers with a mascara brush. The skin beneath Molina's eyes were soft and bruised looking and on her throat were tiny dark moles. It did not seem right that a woman like Molina, who you could tell was a mother-her body was a mother's body for sure, wide hips-could be a cop;it did not seem right that this person was carrying a gun, in a holster attached to leather belt, and that she could use it, if she wanted to. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Like lots of women who marry young and find themselves mothers by the time they're 25, I felt I no longer had an identity. ~ Rachel Hunter

Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols. ~ John Calvin

something's knocking at the door

a great white light dawns across the
continent
as we fawn over our failed traditions,
often kill to preserve them
or sometimes kill just to kill.
it doesn't seem to matter: the answers dangle just
out of reach,
out of hand, out of mind.


the leaders of the past were insufficient,
the leaders of the present are unprepared.
we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.
it is a waiting without hope, more like a prayer for unmerited grace.


it all looks more and more like the same old movie.
the actors are different but the plot's the same:
senseless.


we should have known, watching our fathers.
we should have known, watching our mothers.
they did not know, they too were not prepared to teach.
we were too naive to ignore their counsel and now we have embraced their ignorance as our own.
we are them, multiplied.
we are their unpaid debts.
we are bankrupt in money and in spirit.


there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the
edge
and will
at any moment
tumble down to join the rest
of us,
the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly
corrupt.


a great white light dawns across the
continent,
the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind,
Charles Bukowski

Most people put off my mother's erratic behavior to the fact that she was a writer, as if that just explained everything. To me that was just an excuse. I mean, brain surgeons can be crazy too, but no one says that's all right. Fortunately for my mother, I am alone in this opinion. ~ Sarah Dessen

I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Mothers are generally starvers or feeders ~ Fiona Wood

Anabel shrugs. "Then take an earlier flight today so you get to see her at the airport, stupid."
Tom shakes his head. "I came to see both of you. To spend time with my womenfolk because I miss you like hell."
They're both smiling and he knows he has said and done the right thing and that's enough for him. Anabel reaches over and hugs him. "You're the best brother in the world, Tom."
When she pulls away from the hug, she slaps him on the cheek. "Are you over it now?" she snaps. "Let's go!" she says, grabbing their mother's keys out of her hands. "I'm sick and tired of you people living interstate and overseas from people you want to be with. You're ruining my life! All of you! ~ Melina Marchetta

My father was raised by a violent alcoholic. There was alcoholism in my mother's family. I'm half-adopted, and my birth father was a drug addict and alcoholic. So, I think they very consciously made decisions and parented me in a way that was aimed to help save me from that. So, I knew it would be particularly painful and it was, especially for my father. ~ Melissa Febos

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her. ~ John Hurt

Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill. ~ Ilya Ehrenburg

The Lady Ishil gestured. "Oh, we asked. It wasn't difficult. Everyone in this pigsty of a town seems to know where you sleep." A delicately curled lip. She let him go. "And with who."
Ringil ignored that one. "I'm a hero, Mother. What do you expect? ~ Richard K. Morgan

It's unfortunate that there's such a disconnect between what's happening on our legislatures and what the public knows about, the consequences what that means for ourselves, our mothers and our wives. ~ Sandra Fluke

When all is said and done, there is no shortcut to Nirvana. But in this narcissistic age of instant gratification and swift solution, the great deception of channeling is that we may glide effortlessly back to the Godhead. All we have is pay our money, take our seats and dream on as loving discarnates lead us to enlightenment. Why, the Big E. is just around the corner and anyway - didn't you know? - we are God. ~ Joe Fisher

Bolshoi ... A mother's life, one long errand. One enormous chore. ~ Daphne Kalotay

As he took possession of it, he was overcome by a sense of something like sacred awe. He carefully spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down on it. He felt blessedly wonderful. He was lying a hundred and fifty feet below the earth, inside the loneliest mountain in France - as if in his own grave. Never in his life had he felt so secure, certainly not in his mother's belly. The world could go up on flames out there, but he would not even notice it here. He even began to cry softly. He did not know who to thank for such good fortune. ~ Patrick Suskind

Little Cinder

Girl, they can't understand you.
You rise from the as-heap in a blaze
and only then do they recognize you
as their one true love.

While you pray beneath your mother's
tree you carrve a phoenix into your palm
wth aa hazel twig and coal;
every night she devours more of you.

You used to believe in angels.
Now you believe in the makeover;
if you can't get the grime off your face
and your foot into a size six heel

who will ever bother to notice you?
The kettle and the broom sear in your grasp,
snap into fragments. The turtledoves sing,
"There's blood within the shoe."

You deserve the palace, you think, as you signal
the pigeons to attack, approve the barrel filled with red-hot nails.
Its great hearth beckons, and the prince's flag
rises crimson in the angry sun.

He will love you for the heat you generate,
for the flames you ignite around you,
though he encase your tiny feet in glass
to keep them from scorching the ground. ~ Jeannine Hall Gailey

Lately, Mami's eyes have been so dark, I don't like looking into them because I'm afraid I'll fall in. ~ Raquel Cepeda

The naked woman marched around the swimming pool, the corpses in the hearse rejoicing that she, too, was dead - these were the "down below" she had feared and fled once before but which mysteriously beckoned her. These were her vertigo: she heard a sweet (almost joyous) summons to renounce her fate and soul. The solidarity of the soulless calling her. And in times of weakness, she was ready to heed the call and return to her mother. She was already to dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of her body; ready to descend to a place among her mother's friemd and laugh when one of them broke wind noisily; ready to march around the pool naked with them and sing. ~ Milan Kundera