Slay Like A Mother Quotes

But, that's the way dragons work. They convince you that nobody wants to hear your busted-up sob story and that it's best to just shut your mouth, put your big girl pants on, and solve your damn problems yourself. ~ Katherine Wintsch

Wow," I said. "That story is disturbing on so many different levels. One thing that's mystifying about Indian mythology is how often the names change. The skin color changes – she's golden, she's black, she's pink. Her name changes – she's Durga, Kali, Parvati. Her personality changes – she's a loving mother, she's a fierce warrior, she's terrible in her wrath, she's a lover, she's vengeful, she's weak and mortal, then she's powerful and can't be defeated. Then there's her marital status – she's sometimes single, sometimes married. It's hard to keep all the stories straight."

Ren snickered. "Sounds like a normal woman to me. ~ Colleen Houck

My kids and I sometimes will just sit in my office and talk about what the world was like 68 million years ago. Amanda, our oldest daughter, wanted to be a paleontologist for a long time. ~ Phil Mickelson

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.

Enemies were:
The Devil (in his many forms)
Next Door
Sex (in its many forms)
Slugs

Friends were:
God
Our dog
Auntie Madge
The Novels of Charlotte Bronte
Slug pellets
and me, at first. ~ Jeanette Winterson

On the drive up here, I saw a goose," he says. "A Canada goose. Fred told me they shit something horrible. They migrate between the north and the south, don't they? Like seniors. ~ Brian Francis

But now what? Why, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my friends, and all I like, and grinds me down into the very dirt! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, and says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it! There isn't one of all these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and myself, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone,--to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I'll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me! ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Ah, mother! How do you do?' said he, giving her a hearty shake of the hand; 'Where did you get that quiz of a hat? It makes you look like an old witch ... '
On his two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both looked very ugly. ~ Jane Austen

I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon- pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance- and disappears. No one sees her leave, but she is gone. ~ Laura Kasischke

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, 'Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!' This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end. ~ J.M. Barrie

I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets. ~ Eva Zeisel

I had noticed, for example, how all my infatuations dissolved as soon as I really became friends with a man, became sympathetic to his problems, listened to him kvetch about his wife, or ex-wives, his mother, his children. After that I would like him, perhaps even love him - but without passion. ~ Erica Jong

All of her aunts said that Bridget looked exactly like her mother as a teenager. Staring at her, Bridget realised she had no memories of her mother being thin. ~ Siobhan Vivian

This man was different from all others; he was forbidden fruit, the outsider. Her mother had trained her well, but she had never told her what to do if a man set her heart to throbbing like the hooves of a runaway horse. ~ Constance O'Banyon

But how will you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty. Men have felt it sometimes when they went through wild forests, and felt that the animals there were at once innocent and pitiless. They might ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten mortal hours in a parlour with an absent-minded tiger? ~ G.K. Chesterton

Plume"

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure - dusky flutter - trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who've engraved on her locket phrases in script: "glide on a blade" and "rustling precedes the shuck." This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it's morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded. ~ Aaron Shurin

More than anyone in that room, I was aware of exactly the sort of person who did such a thing. What I hadnn't realized until that very moment, though, was that it wasn't just my mother who was guilty of all these offenses. I'd told myself that everything I'd done in the weeks before and since she left was to make sure I would never be like her. But it was too late. All I had to do was look at the way I'd reacted to what Cora had told me that morning- taking off, getting wasted, letting myself be left alone in a strange place- to know I already was...

Perhaps I was just like my mother. But looking up at Cora's hand, I had to wonder whether it was possible that this wasn't already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this wasn't already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this was my one last chance to trya nad prove it. There was no way to know. There never is. But I reached out and took it anyway.

~Ruby, pg 225 ~ Sarah Dessen

And as for your hair!it's worse than ever.Can't you drench it in water to take those untidy twists and twirls out of it?'
'It only makes it curl more and more whey it gets dry,' said Molly, sudden tears coming into her eyes as a recollection came before her like a picture seen long ago and forgotten for years-a young mother washing and dressing her little girl; placing the half-naked darling on her knee, and twining the wet rings of dark hair fondly round her fingers, and then, in ecstasy of fondness, kissing the little curly head. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs. ~ Nick Hornby

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

As a single mother, I feel like I carry the weight of the ocean on my shoulders trying to keep my head above water to keep from drowning. I try to stand firm as I dig my toes in the sand, but the troubling waves tend to wash the sand away from under my feet. I lose my balance, but I have to make the best of what I am given; take a leap of faith and start swimming. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

When my mother went to university to become a therapist she learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. ~ Miriam Toews

After some hours, the dogs, exhausted by running round, almost dead, their tongues hanging out, set upon one another and, not knowing what they are doing, tear one another into thousands of pieces with incredible rapidity. Yet they do not do this out of cruelty.

One day, a glazed look in her eyes, my mother said to me: 'When you are in bed and you hear the barking of the dogs in the countryside, hide beneath your blanket, but do not deride what they do: they have an insatiable thirst for the infinite, as you, and I, and all other pale, long-faced human beings do.'

Since that time, I have respected the dead woman's wish. Like those dogs I feel the need for the infinite. I cannot, cannot satisfy this need. I am the son of a man and a woman, from what I have been told.

This astonishes me…I believed I was something more. ~ Comte De Lautreamont

A moment later, as he pulls away from the curb, I'm assuming the ride to school will be awkward with my sister in the back. It's confirmed when she asks, "So what's the deal with you and my sister?"
He laughs shortly and rubs the back of his neck like something is there, tickling, tapping.
"Tamra." Clutching the dashboard, I turn and glare at her. "There is no deal."
She snorts. "Well, we wouldn't be sitting here if that was the case now, would we?"
I open my mouth to demand she end the interrogation when Will's voice stops me.
"I like your sister. A lot."
I look at him dumbly.
He looks at me, lowers his voice to say, "I like you."
I know that, I guess, but heat still crawls over my face. I swing forward in my seat, cross my arms over my chest and stare straight ahead. Can't stop shivering. Can't speak. My throat hurts too much.
"Jacinda," he says.
"I think you've shocked her," Tamra offers, then sighs. "Look, if you like her, you have to make it legit. I don't want everyone at school whispering about her like she's some toy you get your kicks with in a stairwell."
Now I really can't speak. My blood burns. I already have one mother doing her best to control my life. I don't need my sister stepping in as mother number two.
I know," he says. "That's what I'm trying to do now - if she'll let me."
I feel his gaze on the side of my face. Anxious. Waiting. I look at him. A breath shudders from me at the intensity in h ~ Sophie Jordan

My mother had been an actress and we came from that world in New York, the theater world and the downtown sort of theater scene, and so I guess we didn't really have what you'd call like a Hollywood kind of life at all. ~ Martha Plimpton

Philanthropy is natural. For a mother, taking care of her children is natural. If I am rich, I take care of the poor, like a mother would. ~ Manoj Bhargava

One could not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be created after the sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the first leaf ; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any man was oppressed.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book or before even the details or main features of the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a single comic inciden ~ G.K. Chesterton

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved are softened away in pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness - who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the ~ Washington Irving

A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me. Sometimes you went your whole life without knowing you had one and then suddenly it appeared. In Africa, the soul has the same shape as the body but cannot be seen. At night, it travels through the world while a person dreams. But it returns to the body the moment a sleeping person is touched. ~ Jenny Offill

And when you start to think about death, you start to think about what's after it. And then you start hoping there is a God. For me, it's a frightening thought to go nowhere. I also can't believe that people like Stalin and Hitler are gonna go to the same place as Mother Teresa. ~ Peter Steele

Artemis smiled grimly. And for a moment, he felt like his old, conniving self, before Holly and his mother had introduced him to their pesky moral codes. ~ Eoin Colfer

The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up, then hands you to your father, who gently tickles the stomach where the cancer will one day form, studies the eyes where melanoma's dark signature is already written along the optic nerve, touches the back where the liver will one day house the cirrhosis, feels the bloodstream that will sweeten itself into diabetes, admires the shape of the head where the brain will fall to the ax-handle of stroke, or listens to your heart, which, exhausted by the fearful ways and humiliations and indecencies of life, will explode in your chest like a light going out in the world. ~ Pat Conroy

If my kids were to make a talking doll of me as a mother, one of my recorded phrases would be 'I will throw that in the trash.' 'If you don't put that down right now, I will throw that in the trash.' It's very funny to hear myself say certain things - like noticing which phrases become the most popular to use. ~ Justine Bateman

Joy must be one of the pivots of our life. It is the token of a generous personality. Sometimes it is also a mantle that clothes a life of sacrifice and self-giving. A person who has this gift often reaches high summits. He or she is like sun in a community. ~ Mother Teresa

Perry said today that his mother said "Girls look for infinite security; boys look for a mate. Both look for different things." I am at odds. dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man. In other words, I must pour my energies through the direction and force of my mate. My only free act is choosing or refusing that mate. And yet, it is as I feared: I am becoming adjusted and accustomed to that idea. And if I could be your companion I would laugh at those previous fears. I like what you heighten in me. And I am amazed that I, so proud and distainful of custom, could consider marriage an honorable and vital estate. But under certain circumstances I do justly consider it that. ~ Sylvia Plath

Why don't you want to see your mom? Did she burn your
dolls in a sacrificial fire? Read your e-mail?"
"She wants to run my life," I explain.
"What a bitch. It's like she thinks she's your mother
or something."
"She's a psychopath," I said. "It's complicated."
"Psychopaths can't afford fur coats."
"This one can. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Suddenly I'd had Enough and this was no turn of phrase but a warm body, nervous, with a constitution I could count on like a younger brother. That's when I told my mother: on the other side it's really underdeveloped. We're going back. Really, I said: I want to go back, not possible unless Mummy who is part of me comes too. We wait in the empty street at the stop for Lethe, the only bus that runs both ways. My mother is losing patience. The bus doesn't come. It's not easy to wait for a bus you've heard is the only one that runs both ways. I check the guidebook. Neither Canto XIV of the Iliad nor Canto XI of the Odyssey mentions the place. Just what you'd expect for Lethe I tell myself. Naturally forgetfulness attracts attention to itself by means of absence and omission. But for my mother the bus not turning up is the theme of her nightmares. I explain that in this country one comes along every quarter of an hour...To signal to the vehicle that one wishes to board Oblivion Return one must fan open the grille by pressing a button and lighting up the small lantern on the top of the archway, which I did. It's the one gleam of hope in this world. ~ Helene Cixous

My mother said it was like a cassette tape you could never rewind. But it was hard to remember you couldn't rewind it while you were listening to it. And so you'd forget and fall into the music and listen and then, without you even knowing it, the tape would suddenly end. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt

Watching him was like opening the door to a siniging telegram; you know it's supposed to be entertaining, but you can't get beyond the sad fact that this person actually thinks he bringing some joy into your life. Somewhere he had a mother who sifted through a shoe box of mimeographed playbills, pouring herself another drink and wondering when her son would come to his senses and swallow some drain cleaner. ~ David Sedaris

Did my daughter appear to me a decade and a half before she was born? I like to think so. There she was, looping back through time to brush past a person not yet ready to be her mother--nowhere near ready, if I'm honest--tipping me the wink that she would one day arrive in my life. Readying me, perhaps, for the road ahead, sowing the seeds for all the strength, compassion and resilience required for her existence. ~ Maggie O'Farrell

When he heard people with no knowledge of a cat's character saying that cats were not as loving as dogs, that they were cold and selfish, he always thought to himself how impossible it was to understand the charm and lovableness of a cat if one had not, like him, spent many years living alone with one. The reason was that all cats are to some extent shy creatures: they won't show affection or seek it from their owners in front of a third person but tend rather to be oddly standoffish. Lily too would ignore Shozo or run off when he called her, if his mother were present. But when the two of them were alone, she would climb up on his lap without being called and devote the most flattering attention to him. ~ Junichiro Tanizaki

Those to whom man teaches little, nature like a wise and prudent mother teaches much. ~ Hannah Crafts

I didn't like to stop playing for a second to bother with eating or going to the bathroom. I was a really skinny kid, and I remember my mother always telling people, 'I don't know how she's alive. I think she gets all of her nutrients from air pollution.' ~ Tig Notaro

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby with no regrets and I don't mind saying it's a sad, sad story when a mother will teach her daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger. And how in the world can the words that I said send somebody so over the edge that they'd write me a letter saying that I better shut up and sing or my life will be over? ~ Dixie Chicks

I didn't do anything.I fumble with tears."
"You listened." She handed him back his bandanna.
"Mostly because tears render me speechless.You've a bit of garden dirt here."
Keeley came down the path just in time to see Brian gently wipe her mother's face with a blue bandanna.The tearstains had her leaping forward like a mama bear to her threatened cub.
"What is it? What did you do?" Hissing at Brian, she wrapped an arm around Adelia's shoudler.
"Nothing.I just knocked your mother down and kicked her a few times. ~ Nora Roberts

To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

there are now only two people on earth who know who he is." He swung a finger back and forth between them. "Us." He squeezed her hands, held her eyes with his. "That's why it's such - joy for me to be with you again. Not just because you're my mother. Because you know who I am, because I don't have to hide the truth from you! And don't you feel something like that toward me? How ~ Ira Levin

Her father said, "You know, my dears, the world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes." "Even at a time like this?" Meg asked. The call from Calvin, the sound of her husband's voice, had nearly broken her control. "Especially at a time like this," her mother said gently. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

I know strong cages that are narrow and difficult to avoid: the cages of love. I'm not sure if others build them, like a tailor makes clothes fitted for you, or if you make them on your own. Whether it's the love of a mother, of a child, or of a mate, all cages are made of threats and guilt. ~ Sibyl Von Der Schulenburg

She dreamed about knights in armour and glorious quests, and sometimes in these dreams she was a knight and sometimes she was a lovely lady who watched a particular knight and hoped that, when he won the tournament, it would be she to who he came, and stooped on bended knee, and ... and sometimes she dreamed that she was a lady who tied her hair up and pulled a helmet down over it and over her face, and won the tournament herself, and everyone watching said, Who is that strange knight? For I have never seen his like. After her mother fell ill and she no longer had time to read, she still dreamed ... ~ Robin McKinley