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Mother Quotes

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Mother Quotes

“Raising a daughter is an extremely political act in this culture. Mothers have been placed in a no-win situation with their daught ers: if they teach their daughters simply how to get along in a world that has been shaped by men and male desires, then they betray their daughters' potential But, if they do not, they leave their daughters adrift in a hostile world without survival strategies.”

“To forgive the incessant provocations of daily life - to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son - how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says.”

“Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.”

“Washing the Dead is an illuminating and intricately layered novel about the complicated legacies that pass from mother to daughter, and about the ways that understanding our own history helps make us who we are. Michelle Brafman is an insightful writer who never falters or flinches in her quest to uncover the hearts of her characters.”

“Honor thy Father and thy Mother was once said, but then someone said: What if I don't know your Father? A still voice said: Does that makes him the devil? He is still someone's Father, his name has been changed, but his story is the same. Why hate when we should Celebrate. In this world of two's, you got the Mourning Son, and the Daughter of the Night. They both equal light once you make it through the night. Now, wake the funk up!”

“I am in total opposition to any institutional power. I favor a world of neighborhoods in which all social organization is voluntary and the ways of life are established in small, consenting groups. These groups could cooperate with other groups as they saw fit. But all cooperation would be on a voluntary basis. As the French anarchist Proudhon said. “Liberty [is] not the daughter but the Mother of Order.”

“Women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders. Women need to attack culture's oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to "buy in" or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate.”

“I know also another man who married a widow with several children; and when one of the girls had grown into her teens he insisted on marrying her also, having first by some means won her affections. The mother, however, was much opposed to this marriage, and finally gave up her husband entirely to her daughter; and to this very day the daughter bears children to her stepfather, living as wife in the same house with her mother!”

“I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can't live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers' hearts.”

“Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.”

“Commerce however we may please ourselves with the contrary opinion, is one of the daughters of fortune, inconstant and deceitful as her mother. She chooses her residence where she is least expected, and shifts her abode when her continuance is, in appearance, most firmly settled.”

“A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world.”

“Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.”

“I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.”

“all daughters, even when most aggravated by their mothers, have a secret respect for them. They believe perhaps that they can do everything better than their mothers can, and many things they can do better, but they have not yet lived long enough to be sure how successfully they will meet the major emergencies of life, which lie, sometimes quite creditably, behind their mothers.”

“She [a mother] never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their new-born child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.”

“What daughter thinks of her parents in flagrante delicto? Yet, my mother, even after years with him, dropped hints such as, 'You know, your father enjoys his matinees.' I never even saw them go to the movies together. What could she mean? All those afternoons, I thought she was upstairs listening to La Traviata, and those high notes apparently were not coming from the radio.”