mothers

1.

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhood and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

- Duras, Marguerite

2.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

- Rich, Adrienne

3.

What is the commonest, and yet the least remembered form of heroism? The heroism of an average mother. Ah! when I think of that broad fact I gather hope again for poor humanity, and this dark world looks bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more, because, whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.

- Lecture on Heroism. 1873.

4.

For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

- Rimbaud, Arthur

5.

I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!

- Lansbury, Angela

6.

A mother's heart is always with her children.

- Proverb

7.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

- Whitman, Walt

8.

Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realize you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.

- Weldon, Fay

9.

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.

- Aristotle

10.

When I walk into my kitchen today, I am not alone. Whether we know it or not, none of us is. We bring fathers and mothers and kitchen tables, and every meal we have ever eaten. Food is never just food. It's also a way of getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.

- Molly Wizenberg

11.

There is always so much talk about the sins of the fathers, but it is the sins of the mothers that are the most difficult to avoid repeating.

- Melanie Benjamin

12.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

- Friedan, Betty

13.

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.

- Cervantes, Miguel De

14.

We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.

- Donne, John

15.

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

- Proverb

16.

The best thing that could happen to motherhood already has. Fewer women are going into it.

- Billings, Victoria

17.

What we choose to call sanity is a big house where the mad have no mothers.

- The Clown Prince of Darkness

18.

Daughters go into analysis hating their fathers and come out hating their mothers. They never come out hating themselves.

- Laurie Jo Wojcik

19.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

- West, Rebecca

20.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

- Rich, Adrienne