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Maternal Quotes

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Maternal Quotes

“I cannot imagine how much I must’ve suffered in my previous lives to be fortunate enough to have parents like you in this life.”

“The poor mother! This is the reward you get for your love. Is that what you expected? Well, the fact of the matter is that mothers don't expect rewards. There's no rhyme or reason — they just love. Do you achieve greatness and fame, are you proud, is your name on everyone's lips, do your deeds resound around the world? Then your mother trembles with joy, she weeps, laughs and prays long and ardently. But you, the son, rarely think of sharing your success with the woman who bore you. Are you lacking in wit or spirit, has nature denied you beauty, are your heart and body dogged by ill health, do people shun you, and is there no place for you among them? Then so much the bigger is your place in a mother's heart, and so much more tightly does she enfold you in her arms, ill-favored, failed creature though you are, and so much the longer and more fervently does she pray for you.”

“The abject impulse is inalienably connected with the feminine, specifically the maternal. As it forms out of the undefined morass of relations, surfaces and currents that existed before the Oedipal or mirror-stage coordinated them, the subject seems built around a primal sense of loss. The developing sense of the limits of the body is focussed on those holes in it's surface through which the outside becomes inside and vice versa: the mouth, anus, genitals, even the invisibly porous surface of the skin. It was the mother's body that was most connected with these crossing-points, as it fed and cleaned the undefined infant body. The sense that boundaries and limits are forming around this permable flesh is interpreted then as the withdrawal or even loss, of intimacy with the body of the mother, firstly in the increasing distance of the practical hygiene operations it performs and secondly, more remotely, beyond that in it's archaic ur-form as the body through which the child entered into the world.”

“Wolf, as he watched her, felt weak, despicable, faltering. He felt like a finical attendant watching the splendid fury of some Sophoclean heroine. He became aware that her anger leaped up from some incalculable crevasse in the rock crust of the universe, such as he himself had never approached. The nature of her feelings, its directness, its primordial simplicity, reduced his own emotion to something ridiculous. She towered above him there with that grand convulsed face and those expanded breasts; while her fine hands, clutching at her belt, seemed to display a wild desire to strip naked before him, to overwhelm him with the wrath of her naked maternal body, bare to the outrage of his impiety.”

“So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.”