Quotes and Sayings about Mother
"My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty cents that the adults had to pay."
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
(Related: Movies, Mother)
"Joseph and his mother come from the black kings who were before the white man."
- Peter Abrahams
(Related: Mother, Kings, Man)
"Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country."
- John Acton
(Related: Mother, Being, Constitution, Country, Democracy, English, Revolution, Opposition, Result, states, Traditions, United)
"Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since."
- Abigail Adams
(Related: Mother, Thought, Knowledge, Daughters)
"Aristotle uses a mother's love for her child as the prime example of love or friendship."
- Mortimer Adler
(Related: Friendship, Love, Mother, Example)
"I thank God, Jesus, and my Grandmother for being able to support myself and my family."
- Steven Adler
(Related: Family, God, Being, Support)
"Obedience is the mother of success and is wedded to safety."
- Aeschylus
(Related: Success, Mother, Obedience, Safety)
"Memory is the mother of all wisdom."
- Aeschylus
(Related: Wisdom, Mother, Memory)
"My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I'm 31-years-old, and I don't want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It's humiliating."
- Ben Affleck
(Related: Mother, Sleep, Want)
"My mother was the total influence. My father was what we call a nomadic person; he was a wanderer."
- Danny Aiello
(Related: Mother, Father, Influence)
"I don't know anyone who curses the way they do on the Sopranos. Not in an Italian household. I never said the word hell in front of my mother."
- Danny Aiello
(Related: Mother, Hell, Word)
"Well, financially it's a little bit better. But it's better than than when I was a teacher. But I kind of - it's allowed me to buy a house. And I've been able to help my mother with some stuff and my brother. So, that's nice."
- Clay Aiken
(Related: Mother, Brother, Help)
"My mother taught me that we all have the power to achieve our dreams. What I lacked was the courage."
- Clay Aiken
(Related: Power, Dreams, Mother, Courage)
"Where there is a mother in the home, matters go well."
- Amos Bronson Alcott
(Related: Home, Mother)
"What do girls do who haven't any mothers to help them through their troubles?"
- Louisa May Alcott
(Related: Girls, Help, Mothers)
"Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged."
- Louisa May Alcott
(Related: Faith, Mother, Son)
"My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Mother, Father)
"Am I calm all the time? That is a question to ask my mother. I am very happy in my home. I have a good family, that gives me something extra."
- Jean Alesi
(Related: Family, Home, Time, Mother, Question)
"Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life."
- Saul Alinsky
(Related: Life, Politics, Time, Mother, Father, Bed, Corruption, Play)
"When my mother had to get dinner for 8 she'd just make enough for 16 and only serve half."
- Gracie Allen
(Related: Mother)
"This land, which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and gospel is free."
- Richard V. Allen
(Related: Wisdom, Mother, Blood, Country, Land, Now, Tears)
"I probably spend more time with my kids than the average stay-at-home mother."
- Kirstie Alley
(Related: Time, Mother, Kids)
"Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities."
- Pedro Almodovar
(Related: Love, Mother, Want)
"After the enormous success of All About my Mother, all the awards and everything, I wanted to start a movie in exactly the same place that I used to be before. I wanted to show that all of the success had not changed my perception."
- Pedro Almodovar
(Related: Success, Mother, Perception, Awards)
"My mother used to take my brother and me to get any books we wanted, but they were second hand books published in the '30s and '40s. I liked scary books."
- Alejandro Amenabar
(Related: Mother, Brother, Books)
"During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child."
- Namie Amuro
(Related: Mother, Grief, Nothing)
"My mother speaks of my step being a source of life-long pain to her, that it is a living death, etc. By the same post I had several letters from anxious relatives, telling me that it was my duty to come home and thus ease my mother's anxiety."
- Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
(Related: Home, Death, Mother, Life, Anxiety, Being, Duty, Letters, Living, Pain, Post, Relatives)
"My grandmother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher, my daughter was a teacher and is now a superintendent in northern California, and my son-in-law is a high school principal. I am surrounded."
- Loni Anderson
(Related: Sister, Son, Daughter, Now, School)
"My daughter teases me once in a while saying, Remember when you used to be my mother and you had black hair?"
- Loni Anderson
(Related: Mother, Daughter, Hair, Saying)
"I'm a mother with two small children, so I don't take as much crap as I used to."
- Pamela Anderson
(Related: Mother, Children)
"Sarah will talk to me about someone and I don't know who she's talking about, but if she talks to my mother, the two of them will know exactly - and across several generations, too."
- Prince Andrew
(Related: Mother, Generations, Talk, Talking, Will)
"She is incredibly fit, but we remind staff that she's not just the monarch, but our mother."
- Prince Andrew
(Related: Mother)
"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."
- Maya Angelou
(Related: Mother, People, College, Ignorance, School, Understanding)
"For mothers who must earn, there is indeed no leisure time problem. The long hours of earning are increased by the hours of domestic labor, until no slightest margin for relaxation or change of thought remains."
- Katharine Anthony
(Related: Change, Time, Thought, Labor, Leisure, Mothers, Relaxation)
"Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother."
- Susan B. Anthony
(Related: Progress, Invention, Law, Today, Woman)
"My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer."
- David Antin
(Related: Mother, Thought)
"When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval."
- David Antin
(Related: Mother, HusbApproval, Autobiography)
"Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth."
- Mary Antin
(Related: Growth, Mothers, Spiritual)
"I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long."
- Marie Antoinette
(Related: Mother, Wife, HusbBlood, Children, Queen)
"No one understands my ills, nor the terror that fills my breast, who does not know the heart of a mother."
- Marie Antoinette
(Related: Mother, Heart, Terror)
"I think maintaining relationships with my friends, my mother, my manager, they're all important."
- Christina Applegate
(Related: Manager, Mother, Friends, Relationships)
"When a mother quarrels with a daughter, she has a double dose of unhappiness hers from the conflict, and empathy with her daughter's from the conflict with her. Throughout her life a mother retains this special need to maintain a good relationship with her daughter."
- Terri Apter
(Related: Life, Mother, Daughter, Conflict, Empathy, Quarrels, Unhappiness)
"When you grow up your mother says, 'Wear rubbers or you'll catch cold.' When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It's something like that."
- Diane Arbus
(Related: Mother, Right)
"Since God had commanded it, it was necessary that I do it. Since God commanded it, even if I had a hundred fathers and mothers, even if I had been a King's daughter, I would have gone nevertheless."
- Joan of Arc
(Related: God, Daughter, Fathers, Mothers)
"Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own."
- Aristotle
(Related: Children, Fathers, Mothers)
"My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs."
- Joan Armatrading
(Related: Mother, Songs, Writing)
"Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb."
- Jean Arp
(Related: Art, Mother, Man)
"It's so hard to be a mother and to also want to practice your art."
- Rosanna Arquette
(Related: Art, Mother, Practice, Want)
"My mother, she had a very good attitude toward money. I'm very grateful for the fact that we had to learn to save. I used to get like 50 pence a week, and I'd save it for like five months. And then I'd spend it on Christmas presents. I'd save up like eight pounds. It's nothing, but we did that."
- Gemma Arterton
(Related: Money, Mother, Attitude, Christmas, Fact, Months, Nothing)
"If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before."
- John Ashcroft
(Related: Mother, Father, Cooperation, Invention, Necessity)
"Comic books and The Chronicles of Narnia. My mother used to read those to me and my twin brother growing up."
- Shawn Ashmore
(Related: Mother, Brother, Books, Growing up)
"The interest of my mother was more in the entertainment field. She loved to go to concerts and to the theatre."
- Leon Askin
(Related: Mother, Entertainment, Interest, Theatre)
"When I was eight years old I went to visit my brother who was working on a movie of the week with my mother and I saw how much fun he was having and I decided I wanted to try it too."
- Mackenzie Astin
(Related: Mother, Brother, Fun, Old, Visit, Years)
"Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done."
- Margaret Atwood
(Related: Consequences, Mothers, Right)
"Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one."
- Margaret Atwood
(Related: Mother, Being)
"Because my father was often absent on naval duty, my mother suffered me to do much as I pleased."
- John James Audubon
(Related: Mother, Father, Duty)
"Poverty is the mother of crime."
- Marcus Aurelius
(Related: Mother, Crime, Poverty)
"Winning that first game was so important; my mother always said that the first game of the second set was the chance to keep it going if you were ahead or change things if you were behind."
- Tracy Austin
(Related: Change, Mother, Winning, Chance, First)
"People in England were coming up to me, saying, My mother and father turned me on to your music. This happened to me 20 years ago. When I was 40 they were saying that."
- Roy Ayers
(Related: Music, Mother, Father, People, England, Saying, Years)
"There's huge, massive mother ships going up to the Yukon. They've been filmed and are on video."
- Dan Aykroyd
(Related: Mother, Ships)
"A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault."
- Walter Bagehot
(Related: Mother, Wife, Fault, Man, Misfortune)
"Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history."
- Anita Baker
(Related: History, Medical, Happiness, Emotions, Motherhood, Nothing, Words)
"As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings - not run across the street and ask what my mother thinks."
- Ralph Bakshi
(Related: Mother, Feelings, Artist, Want)
"My dad was born in Chicago in 1908... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business."
- Bob Balaban
(Related: Business, Dad, Idea, Chicago, Children, Parents, Russia)
"Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character."
- Hosea Ballou
(Related: Education, Mother, Character, Children, Word)
"The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute."
- Honore De Balzac
(Related: Art, Detail, Devotion, Motherhood, Self)
"The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness."
- Honore de Balzac
(Related: Forgiveness, Mother, Heart, Deep, Will)
"Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!"
- Honore De Balzac
(Related: Brothers, Enemies, Kings, Sons)
"A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears."
- Honore de Balzac
(Related: Life, Mother, Now)
"A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories."
- Honore de Balzac
(Related: Happiness, Mother, Future, Memories, Past)
"A mother who is really a mother is never free."
- Honore de Balzac
(Related: Mother)
"It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment."
- Honore De Balzac
(Related: Act, Fashion, Joy, Motherhood, Woman)
"The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after."
- Tallulah Bankhead
(Related: Mother, Night)
"It also called upon traditional people in the Four Directions to strengthen the healing ceremonies and asked people to heed the warnings of Mother Earth."
- Dennis Banks
(Related: Mother, People, Earth, Healing)
"Even the people who come our way look upon us in amazement, that we run only for the healing of Mother Earth."
- Dennis Banks
(Related: Mother, People, Earth, Healing)
"Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science."
- Roger Bannister
(Related: Science, Work, Education, Mother, Mothers, Parents, Poor, Training)
"When I was about to break a world record and become well known, my mother used to say that for her the important thing was for me to become a doctor - a career which had not been possible in her generation and in her society. Sport was something to be set aside."
- Roger Bannister
(Related: Society, Mother, Career, World)
"Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother."
- Christine Baranski
(Related: Mother, Children, Effect, Losing)
"My daddy died when I was two years old. My mother raised my two older brothers and me. And we couldn't have had a better situation. I mean, she was the - ran the concession stand at the Little League, and she was the first woman president of The Touchdown Club, the booster club for the high school football team. And so, I had a wonderful childhood."
- Haley Barbour
(Related: Mother, Brothers, Childhood, First, Football, Old, President, School, Woman, Years)
"I am no mother, and I won't be one."
- Brigitte Bardot
(Related: Mother)
"When a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, so desperately wants a baby what she's looking for is the kind of unconditional love a child gives a mother and a mother gives a child."
- Ellen Barkin
(Related: Love, Mother, Baby)
"You've got a movie where the pro-choice family gives their daughter no choice. The pro-life family murders. What seems to be the good mother, the kind of hippie painter, sweet and cute mother has no love for her daughter really."
- Ellen Barkin
(Related: Family, Love, Mother, Daughter, Choice, Cute)
"When I played Leonardo DiCaprio's mother, they liked that Leo had very hooded eyes and a rounded nose with a ball. They said, They look like they could be mother and son."
- Ellen Barkin
(Related: Mother, Son, Eyes)
"There's a lot more to being a woman than being a mother, but there's a hell of a lot more to being a mother than most people suspect."
- Roseanne Barr
(Related: Mother, People, Being, Hell, Woman)
"Never say anything on the phone that you wouldn't want your mother to hear at your trial."
- Sydney Biddle Barrows
(Related: Mother, Want)
"My wife is the kind of girl who will not go anywhere without her mother, and her mother will go anywhere."
- John Barrymore
(Related: Mother, Wife, Will)
"I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying."
- Mikhail Baryshnikov
(Related: Mother, People, Party, Russia)
"Michael Jackson has some contact with his mother. I know she is involved with the children."
- Martin Bashir
(Related: Mother, Children)
"There's no doubt that becoming a mother was the greatest thing I'll ever do."
- Kim Basinger
(Related: Mother, Doubt)
"Mothers - especially single mothers - are heroic in their efforts to raise our nation's children, but men must also take responsibility for their children and recognize the impact they have on their families' well-being."
- Evan Bayh
(Related: Men, Children, Mothers, Nation, Responsibility)
"My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money."
- Warren Beatty
(Related: Money, Mother, Father, Profession, Teachers)
"My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up."
- Alison Bechdel
(Related: Mother, Father)
"Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow."
- Alison Bechdel
(Related: Mother)
"Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude."
- Beck
(Related: Art, Nature, Mother, Attitude)
"As a mother, you feel much more vulnerable. And when you're vulnerable, you're a much better actress."
- Kate Beckinsale
(Related: Mother)
"God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness."
- Henry Ward Beecher
(Related: Forgiveness, Mother, God, Kisses)
"What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin."
- Henry Ward Beecher
(Related: Mother)
"The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom."
- Henry Ward Beecher
(Related: Mother, Heart)
"The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom, but it is always on her heart."
- Henry Ward Beecher
(Related: Mother, Heart, First)
"France, mother of arts, of warfare, and of laws."
- Joachim du Bellay
(Related: Mother, France, Laws)
"My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity."
- Roberto Benigni
(Related: Mother, Father, Childhood, Humanity)
"My mother brought me magicians and witches, because I was very ugly, really revolting. So she thought somebody had put a spell on me - this is the truth - so she made me drink some horrible terrifying potions, for year."
- Roberto Benigni
(Related: Mother, Truth, Thought, Ugly, Witches)
"Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like."
- Arnold Bennett
(Related: Mother)
"Never marry a man who hates his mother because he'll end up hating you."
- Jill Bennett
(Related: Mother, End, Man)
"My mother, sister and I watched through the windows as my father gambled."
- Tom Berenger
(Related: Mother, Father, Sister, Windows)
"My father was a sergeant with the Connecticut state police. My mother was a hairstylist."
- Michael Bergin
(Related: Mother, Father, Police, State)
"Until 45 I can play a woman in love. After 55 I can play grandmothers. But between those ten years, it is difficult for an actress."
- Ingrid Bergman
(Related: Love, Play, Woman, Years)
"If they had killed by father and my mother and all my friends, yet if they had come to treat of peace, they ought to have gone in peace."
- William Berkeley
(Related: Peace, Mother, Father, Friends)
"If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?"
- Milton Berle
(Related: Evolution, Mothers)
"What does the truth matter? Haven't we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!"
- Georges Bernanos
(Related: Truth, Lies, Mothers, Sons, Taste)
"Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message."
- William Bernbach
(Related: Cleverness, Clients, Job)
"When I was a kid, my mother told me that if you could not be a good loser, then there's no way you could be a good winner."
- Halle Berry
(Related: Mother)
"I don't see a white woman. I see a black woman, even though my mother is white. Knowing that has made my life easier, I think."
- Halle Berry
(Related: Life, Mother, Woman)
"Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Mother, Feeling)
"My mother's sympathies were strongly with the Union. She knew that war was bound to come, but so confident was she in the strength of the Federal Government that she devoutly believed that the struggle could not last longer than six months at the utmost."
- Buffalo Bill
(Related: Government, War, Mother, Strength, Months, Struggle)
"Be kind to your mother-in-law, but pay for her board at some good hotel."
- Josh Billings
(Related: Mother)
"The best thing that could happen to motherhood already has. Fewer women are going into it."
- Victoria Billings
(Related: Women, Motherhood)
"Sexual liberation, as a slogan, turns out to be another kind of bondage. For a woman it offers orgasm as her ultimate and major fulfillment; it's better than motherhood."
- Victoria Billings
(Related: Fulfillment, Motherhood, Woman)
"Maybe it's because my mother divorced and my grandmother divorced, so maybe I'm frightened deep down. But then I also feel there is no real need. Why do I need to get married? To reassure me? No I don't need reassurance."
- Juliette Binoche
(Related: Mother, Deep, Reassurance)
"Any film I see at two o'clock in afternoon with my mother seems to cast a strange spell that means we both come out sobbing."
- Jane Birkin
(Related: Mother, Film)
"My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust."
- Jane Birkin
(Related: Mother, Nothing, Reading)
"It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him."
- Jim Bishop
(Related: Mother, Father, Pleasure, Writer)
"I'm doing it with a rock format and the words are about people living in harmony with Mother Earth. It's very important to me - and I feel it should be for every living human on this planet."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Mother, People, Earth, Harmony, Living, Words)
"We never got anything out of the recordings. I'm still as broke as I was when I was with the Mothers."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Mothers)
"We are not a Zappa cover band. We only play Frank's songs that were recorded by the Mothers of Invention and I think a lot of those songs were complex."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Invention, Mothers, Play, Songs)
"I've been writing Indian music for a while. Indian music is about Mother Earth, and mine is no exception."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Music, Mother, Earth, Writing)
"I don't know how Frank presented the old Mothers, since I never read the book. There might be some opinions on what he said, but I - or anyone else - could not make any corrections to anything Frank did."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Mothers, Old, Opinions)
"I think a lot of the Mothers stuff that we recorded was written while we were on the road."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Mothers, Road)
"I think that the old Mothers started that trend of rehearsing long hours. We went as long as the later bands did except we didn't get paid for it like they did."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Mothers, Old)
"I went to work with a guy named Matt Fuller, who was a Mothers fan, and low and behold, Arthur was working for him also. We worked together for about six months and decided to strike out on our own."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Work, Months, Mothers)
"The purpose of The Motherhood Manifesto is mothers really need to be given the ability to parent."
- Joan Blades
(Related: Purpose, Ability, Motherhood, Mothers)
"Even though mother's issues are not front page news, they touch us all personally, some more than others, and I believe passionately in the power of grassroots engagement."
- Joan Blades
(Related: Power, Mother, News)
"The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city."
- Ruben Blades
(Related: Life, Mother, Songs)
"I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang."
- Ruben Blades
(Related: Mother, Opera, Singing)
"When I was 13 I asked my mother if it was possible for this to end - I'd had enough of it. And that was right about the time that we got a call for "The Exorcist" interview."
- Linda Blair
(Related: Time, Mother, End, Right)
"I was so sad from losing two of my dogs and my mother. I had this vision of all these animals sitting behind bars. They had no control and were scared. That's why I got into fostering and adopting animals out."
- Linda Blair
(Related: Mother, Control, Vision, Animals, Dogs, Losing)
"Mother is the first word that occurs to politicians and columnists and popes when they raise the question, 'Why isn't life turning out the way we want it?'"
- Mary Kay Blakely
(Related: Life, Mother, First, Politicians, Question, Want, Word)
"A mother is neither cocky, nor proud, because she knows the school principal may call at any minute to report that her child had just driven a motorcycle through the gymnasium."
- Mary Kay Blakely
(Related: Mother, May, School)
"Winston Churchill was not entirely British. His mother was American, making Sir Winston part Iroquois Indian."
- Rachel Blanchard
(Related: Mother, American)
"Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine."
- Allan Bloom
(Related: Success, Idea, Children, Competence, Fathers, Mothers)
"The capitalist class shoots down mothers and children. It stops at nothing, no matter how monstrous, to prevent the organization of the workers."
- Ella R. Bloor
(Related: Children, Class, Mothers, Nothing, Workers)
"My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston."
- Lionel Blue
(Related: Religion, Mother, Dance, Day, Interest, Sun, Woman)
"My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely."
- Lionel Blue
(Related: Age, Mother, Old)
"My mother was really into big band. It was played in the house all the time."
- Suzy Bogguss
(Related: Time, Mother)
"When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it is a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Mother, Advice, Want)
"Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Wisdom, Mother, Infinite)
"It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Mother, Compassion, Judgment, Understanding)
"I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Mother, Order)
"There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Mother, Water, Wrong)
"No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Bed, Children, Mothers)
"Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Business, Society, Mother, Gifts, Years)
"Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Home, Work, Mother, Being, Hurt, Occupation, Summer)
"My mother, brave woman, lost her whole family when she decided to marry a black man in the '60s. When the marriage fell apart, she had to come back to her family."
- Lisa Bonet
(Related: Family, Marriage, Mother, Man, Woman)
"I was literally the black sheep of the family, and there were definitely moments of discomfort while my grandmother was working through her racism."
- Lisa Bonet
(Related: Family, Moments, Racism, Sheep)
"My mother was a regular church-goer and was very tolerant."
- Emma Bonino
(Related: Mother, Church)
"My mother's studies stopped with the third year of primary school, my father with the first. They taught me a deep sense of duty. But nobody was involved in politics in my family."
- Emma Bonino
(Related: Family, Politics, Father, Mother, Deep, Duty, First, School, Sense)
"A woman must combine the role of mother, wife and politician."
- Emma Bonino
(Related: Mother, Wife, Woman)
"I had a very strong-willed mother, who I totally adored. She was always in control of her life."
- Jan de Bont
(Related: Life, Mother, Control)
"So although women can do anything that men can't do, they can also do something that men can't do, and that is mother their children."
- Pat Boone
(Related: Men, Women, Mother, Children)
"The Vatican is against surrogate mothers. Good thing they didn't have that rule when Jesus was born."
- Elayne Boosler
(Related: Mothers)
"Tell mother, tell mother, I died for my country... useless... useless."
- John Wilkes Booth
(Related: Mother, Country)
"I always went to my sister, because she was older and had the care of me after my mother died."
- Lizzie Andrew Borden
(Related: Mother, Sister, Care)
"My father invented a cure for which there was no disease and unfortunately my mother caught it and died of it."
- Victor Borge
(Related: Mother, Father, Cure, Disease)
"A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable."
- Robert Bork
(Related: Society, Chaos, Laws, Network)
"The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come."
- Amar Bose
(Related: Food, Time, Mother, Father, Prejudice, states, United)
"The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household."
- Amar Bose
(Related: Food, Mother, Father, Deep, Philosophy)
"I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized that to many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image."
- David Bowie
(Related: Sex, Mother, People, Symbol)
"My 80-year-old mother will not buy her heart medicine because it cost more than she can pay with social security. She is America."
- Jack Bowman
(Related: Mother, Heart, America, Medicine, Security, Will)
"I know from my constituency what is going on. Doctors that are told, begged, by mothers, 'Please don't write down that my child as asthma. Please lie and say it's bronchitis, because if you write down asthma, when my child turns 18 or 20 and has to get his or her own insurance, it will be a pre-existing condition.'"
- Barbara Boxer
(Related: Lie, Doctors, Mothers, Will)
"I had so many freckles that my mother used to say that they were kisses from the angels. I still have them."
- Lara Flynn Boyle
(Related: Mother, Angels, Kisses)
"I thought I was going to be a lot more freaked out by being naked onstage. I think on film I would have been more freaked out, because film is less forgiving. But onstage it's lit so beautifully. It would make my mother look good."
- Lorraine Bracco
(Related: Mother, Thought, Being, Film)
"My mother worked in factories, worked as a domestic, worked in a restaurant, always had a second job."
- Ed Bradley
(Related: Mother, Job)
"Probably my mother. She was a very compassionate woman, and always kept me on my feet. And I think part of it is just the way you are, the way you're raised. And she had the responsibility for raising me."
- Ed Bradley
(Related: Mother, Feet, Responsibility, Woman)
"We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings."
- F. H. Bradley
(Related: Mother, Children, Mothers)
"The workplace should have a place where the kids can visit. They should have places at the mother's or the father's work where professionals can have their kids visit them whenever they feel like it."
- Eric Braeden
(Related: Work, Mother, Father, Kids, professionals, Visit)
"If both parents must work, I think it is more important that the mother has proximity to the child to therefore establish a childcare situation at the big corporations not once a day, but many times a day."
- Eric Braeden
(Related: Work, Mother, Corporations, Day, Parents)
"A mother's got to be there to raise the children. That's all there is to it. I feel badly for those mothers who work hard, and can't do it all the time."
- Eric Braeden
(Related: Time, Work, Mother, Children, Mothers)
"And getting older, what's happening is, I play only mothers."
- Sonia Braga
(Related: Mothers, Play)
"I grew up in a very open-minded family. My father died when I was very little, so my mother was really, really incredibly busy trying to provide for us."
- Sonia Braga
(Related: Family, Mother, Father, Open, Trying)
"It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother."
- Georg Brandes
(Related: Mother)
"My mother is my manager and so knows exactly what I do and so on."
- Jonathan Brandis
(Related: Manager, Mother)
"My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost."
- Richard Branson
(Related: Car, Home, Mother, Old, Years)
"For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift."
- Wernher von Braun
(Related: Mother, Thought, Boys, First)
"If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing you grandmother with her teeth out."
- George Brett
(Related: Sister, Kissing, Losing)
"My grandmother was the greatest cook in the world. She could just go in there, the whole kitchen would look like a tornado hit it and then she'd come out with the best food. Then she'd sit at the table and she wouldn't eat!"
- Edie Brickell
(Related: Food, Kitchen, World)
"The factory that my grandmother had put under the house to produce these green men to come get me."
- Todd Bridges
(Related: Men)
"The best ally you can have in breaking up a street fight is a grandmother."
- Joe Bob Briggs
(Related: Fight)
"I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood."
- Susie Bright
(Related: Idea, Childhood, Healing, Sadness)
"I am not quite sure where home is right now. I do have places in London and Milan, and a house in Spain. I guess I would say home is where my mother is, and she lives in Spain."
- Sarah Brightman
(Related: Home, Mother, London, Now, Right, Spain)
"My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner."
- Poppy Z. Brite
(Related: Manager, Mother, Father, Financial, Economics, Office)
"My mother had been a country and western singer but when she moved out to Hollywood found it very difficult to get work so when I was born they put me into dance classes and singing classes as soon as I could walk actually."
- Morgan Brittany
(Related: Work, Mother, Dance, Country, Hollywood, Singing)
"So an autobiography about death should include, in my case, an account of European Jewry and of Russian and Jewish events - pogroms and flights and murders and the revolution that drove my mother to come here."
- Harold Brodkey
(Related: Death, Mother, Autobiography, Events, Revolution)
"My mother was the prettiest woman in the town. He was a bit older than her. They made me. And he split."
- Pierce Brosnan
(Related: Mother, Woman)
"My mother taught me to treat a lady respectfully."
- Chris Brown
(Related: Mother, Lady)
"I think what I came through is great, but my son can take it to another level, not having to fight racism. His mother's a Norwegian and I'm mixed up four or five times, so he can face the world."
- James Brown
(Related: Mother, Son, Fight, Racism, World)
"We struggle to understand how any mother could kill her own children."
- Pat Brown
(Related: Mother, Children, Struggle)
"As I pass it, I feel as if I saw a dear old mother, sweet in her weakness, trembling at the approach of her dissolution, but not appealing to me against the inevitable, rather endeavouring to reassure me by her patience, and pointing to a hopeful future."
- Thomas Edward Brown
(Related: Mother, Future, Old, Patience, Weakness)
"When this boy was brought to Dr. Young, his name being William, the same as mine, my mother was ordered to change mine to something else. This, at the time, I thought to be one of the most cruel acts that could be committed upon my rights."
- William Wells Brown
(Related: Change, Time, Mother, Thought, Being, Rights, Name)
"A spirit is, like, your mother, my dad, who've made it. They can come around, but they come around in a loving way because they've already made it to God. Most people make it."
- Sylvia Browne
(Related: God, Dad, Mother, People, Spirit)
"Motherhood: All love begins and ends there."
- Robert Browning
(Related: Love)
"Morality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers' suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions and unwanted children."
- Gro Harlem Brundtland
(Related: Morality, Children, Connection, Dying, Hypocrisy, Mothers, Suffering)
"After Babar's mother was killed by the hunter, he went to the big city."
- Jean de Brunhoff
(Related: Mother)
"Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind."
- Giordano Bruno
(Related: Time, Mother, Father, Truth, Mind)
"Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father."
- Jean de la Bruyere
(Related: Mother, Father, Crime, May, Poverty, Sense)
"Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together."
- Pearl S. Buck
(Related: Love, Kiss, Kissing, Mothers)
"My mother insisted that her children read."
- Jimmy Buffett
(Related: Mother, Children)
"They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse."
- Sitting Bull
(Related: Mother, Earth, Neighbors)
"My grandmother and I followed my mother here, to a house a block north of Hollywood Boulevard but a million miles away from Hollywood, if you know what I mean. We would hang out behind the ropes and look at the movie stars arriving at the premieres."
- Carol Burnett
(Related: Mother, Hollywood, Stars)
"My grandmother and I saw an average of eight movies a week, double features, second run."
- Carol Burnett
(Related: Movies)
"I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me."
- Carol Burnett
(Related: Mother, Girls, Growing up)
"My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Mother, Father, Abuse, Hatred, Parents, Television)
"I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother!"
- Ellen Burstyn
(Related: Now, Play, Thinking)
"Don't smother each other. No one can grow in the shade."
- Leo Buscaglia
"I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time."
- Barbara Bush
(Related: Time, Mother, America, May)
"I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli."
- George H. W. Bush
(Related: Mother, President, states, United)
"Fashion is in my blood. Growing up, I was always clacking around the house in my mother's shoes."
- Sophia Bush
(Related: Mother, Blood, Fashion, Growing up)
"My mother's side of the family was in the production side of theatre. My grandfather, Jose Vega, was a general manager for Neil Simon shows on Broadway."
- Yancy Butler
(Related: Family, Manager, Mother, Production, Theatre)
"My father used to sing to me in my mother's womb. I think I can name about any tune in two beats."
- Yancy Butler
(Related: Mother, Father, Name)
"Getting caught is the mother of invention."
- Robert Byrne
(Related: Mother, Invention)
"I got a part as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor and I had fun doing it. Mother didn't really approve of it, through."
- James Cagney
(Related: Mother, Fun)
"Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols."
- John Calvin
(Related: Mother, Idols)
"My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer."
- James Cameron
(Related: Mother, Father, Artist, Housewife)
"I simply cannot see how denying chemotherapy treatment for Palestinian children increases Israel's security or advances U.S. national interests."
- Lois Capps
(Related: Children, Israel, Security, Treatment)
"My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess."
- Mariah Carey
(Related: Mother, Father, Irish)
"My mother thought Hollywood was a den of iniquity, and people came to terrible bad ends there."
- Kitty Carlisle
(Related: Mother, Thought, People, Hollywood)
"I think of Oprah as a Mother Joseph wannabe, a daytime oracle rewarding the good and punishing the bad."
- Margaret Carlson
(Related: Mother, Oracle)
"I know Mother named me after a railroad man, but it's too late now, I'm afraid. Much, much too late."
- Hoagy Carmichael
(Related: Mother, Man, Now)
"But I still always felt the absence of a mother."
- Marcel Carne
(Related: Mother, Absence)
"I'm just afraid I'm gonna miss it all... being married... being a mother."
- Karen Carpenter
(Related: Mother, Being)
"I used to draw a lot. If my mother would ask me to do something else, I'd have a hairy conniption. I'd just go crazy."
- Jim Carrey
(Related: Mother)
"I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course."
- Jim Carrey
(Related: Mother, Devil, Faces, Saying)
"My dad was like a stage mother he always pushed me to do what I wanted."
- Jim Carrey
(Related: Dad, Mother)
"My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It's just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she's the daughter of alcoholics who'd leave her alone at Christmas time."
- Jim Carrey
(Related: Time, Mother, Daughter, People, Attention, Christmas, Pain)
"Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place."
- Angela Carter
(Related: Life, Mother, Father, Gods, First, Myths, Satisfaction, Silly, Woman)
"My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day."
- Angela Carter
(Related: Family, Time, War, Mother, Talent, Day, Magic, Realism, World, World war)
"I am convinced that this approach, a mainstream Democratic approach, commands the strong support of the American people, and presents a sharp and compassionate contrast to the Republican abortion position which offers no real hope or commitment to mother or child."
- Robert Casey
(Related: Mother, People, Hope, Abortion, American, Commitment, Contrast, Republican, Support)
"In short, our response as a party should be to work to solve the crises that produce crisis pregnancies, and work to make life worth living for mother and child, rather than victimize the child as a way of dealing with the crisis."
- Robert Casey
(Related: Life, Work, Mother, Crisis, Living, Party, Worth)
"He's just like my father that way-my father just adored my mother and let her do whatever she wanted. John's like that. He's a very rare man, a very good man, and I've had a good life with him. I'm proud to be walking in the wake of Johnny's fame."
- June Carter Cash
(Related: Life, Mother, Father, Fame, Man, Walking)
"There are things coming from me that I felt I wanted to talk about. My search for my own blend of spirituality, my acknowledgement of my sexuality, my being the single mother of a young man."
- Ana Castillo
(Related: Mother, Being, Man, Sexuality, Spirituality, Talk)
"My mother was a good mistress to her servants, taking care of them in their sicknesses, not sparing any cost she was able to bestow for their recovery."
- Margaret Cavendish
(Related: Mother, Care)
"As for our garments, my Mother did not only delight to see us neat and cleanly, fine and gay, but rich and costly: maintaining us to the heighth of her estate, but not beyond it."
- Margaret Cavendish
(Related: Mother, Delight, Gay)
"In such misfortunes my Mother was of an heroic spirit, in suffering patiently when there was no remedy, and being industrious where she thought she could help."
- Margaret Cavendish
(Related: Mother, Thought, Being, Help, Spirit, Suffering)
"My grandfather was Catholic; my grandmother, Jewish. Crossing over from Bavaria, as immigrants to the United States, the ship started to sink. My grandmother jumped overboard. My grandfather followed, to save this girl he had never met."
- Emanuel Celler
(Related: states, United)
"There are only two families in the world, my old grandmother used to say, the Haves and the Have-nots."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Old, World)
"I believe there's no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Experience, Mother, Maxims)
"Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Mother, Goal, Diligence, Fortune, Idleness, Man, Wishes)
"No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Children, Fathers, Mothers, Ugly)
"A good wife is one who serves her husband in the morning like a mother does, loves him in the day like a sister does and pleases him like a prostitute in the night."
- Chanakya
(Related: Mother, Sister, Wife, HusbDay, Night)
"Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants."
- Coco Chanel
(Related: Men, Women, Mother, Longing, World)
"At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general."
- Jung Chang
(Related: Age)
"For anyone to open their heart, they need the right atmosphere, and something to prompt them. For my mother it was her trip abroad: she was in a very relaxed, understanding environment. I was very sympathetic towards her."
- Jung Chang
(Related: Mother, Heart, Environment, Open, Right, Understanding)
"I remember when my mother pointed to a stone, and she said this was the kind of stone people used to place on the feet of the baby girls to stop them trying to climb away and unbind their feet."
- Jung Chang
(Related: Mother, People, Baby, Feet, Girls, Trying)
"Ignorance is the mother of admiration."
- George Chapman
(Related: Mother, Admiration, Ignorance)
"There is no theoretical study of motherhood. You know, before I became a mother, I did play a mother, but I was like - I was more thinking of my own mother. I was doing my mother."
- Joan Chen
(Related: Mother, Motherhood, Play, Study, Thinking)
"The Iraqi forces are conducting the Mother of all Retreats."
- Dick Cheney
(Related: Mother)
"I would have gone home to my mother, but I'm not that crazy about my mother."
- Cher
(Related: Home, Mother)
"The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
(Related: Example, Man, Word)
"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
(Related: Mother, Country, Right, Saying, Wrong)
"A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
(Related: War, Mother, Son, Man, Saying)
"I enjoyed my grandparents very much. My mother and father would always allow me to stay with them."
- Dominic Chianese
(Related: Mother, Father, Grandparents)
"The most consistent gift and burden of motherhood is advice."
- Susan Chira
(Related: Advice, Burden, Motherhood)
"The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people."
- Noam Chomsky
(Related: People, Fear, Control, Crime, Drugs, Mothers, Welfare)
"The mother must socialize her daughter to become subordinate to men, and if her daughter challenges patriarchal norms, the mother is likely to defend the patriarchal structures against her own daughters."
- Carol P. Christ
(Related: Men, Mother, Daughter, Daughters)
"My grandmother was, back when they called them 'stewardesses,' a flight attendant. I actually had a ball wearing that little uniform and making sure everything was under control."
- Erika Christensen
(Related: Control)
"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble."
- Agatha Christie
(Related: Mother, Idleness, Invention, Laziness, Necessity, Opinion, Trouble)
"I don't think I would have been a good mother. Being a parent brings immense responsibility. It's a Herculean task. It would be almost too much for me."
- Julie Christie
(Related: Mother, Being, Responsibility)
"Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work in a more efficient way."
- Steven Chu
(Related: Time, Work, Mother, Focus, Project, School)
"Both my parents were doctors, and my mother had her surgery in the house. There were six children."
- Diane Cilento
(Related: Mother, Children, Doctors, Parents)
"The most surprising thing for my mother and father was when I was actually earning more money than them by the time I was about 18. They thought I was going to be the ne'er do well, who they'd have to keep worrying about."
- Diane Cilento
(Related: Money, Time, Mother, Father, Thought)
"My mother felt it was time that I had some parental control, so I went off to America and went to New York."
- Diane Cilento
(Related: Time, Mother, Control, America)
"It was a very odd household, because the grandmothers were so different. Both of them had their own pianos. So it would be duelling pianos by grandmothers."
- Diane Cilento
"I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog."
- Sandra Cisneros
(Related: Mother, People, Name, School, Writer)
"I just managed to convince my grandmother that it was a worth while that was something to do, you know, and when I did finally get the guitar, it didn't seem that difficult to me, to be able to make a good noise out of it."
- Eric Clapton
(Related: Guitar, Worth)
"The sword is very handsome. I am too old and infirm, as you see, to ever use a sword again, but I am glad that my old mother state has not entirely forgotten me."
- George Rogers Clark
(Related: Mother, Old, State)
"Other than motherhood, the eight years that I spent at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I have incredibly fond memories of. It's a beautiful place, with four seasons up in Wisconsin. And really wonderful people."
- Laurel Clark
(Related: People, Memories, Motherhood, Seasons, University, Years)
"This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case."
- Albert Claude
(Related: Death, Work, Mother, Appreciation, Familiarity, Medicine, Study, Tragedy)
"We didn't have television in those days, and many people didn't even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening."
- Beverly Cleary
(Related: Mother, Father, People, Evening, Television)
"I don't think children's inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house; they want places to play."
- Beverly Cleary
(Related: Mother, Father, Feelings, Children, Play, Want)
"I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house."
- Beverly Cleary
(Related: Mother, Books)
"I would never have gone anywhere if it hadn't been for Mother's faith and support."
- Patsy Cline
(Related: Faith, Mother, Support)
"Sitting around the house playing the wife and mother is driving me crazy."
- Patsy Cline
(Related: Mother, Wife, Driving)
"I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs."
- Jim Clyburn
(Related: Mother, Needs, Problems, Public, Schools)
"Postpartum depression is a very real and very serious problem for many mothers. It can happen to a first time mom or a veteran mother. It can occur a few days... or a few months after childbirth."
- Richard J. Codey
(Related: Mom, Time, Mother, Depression, First, Months, Mothers)
"Our mother was a very religious and observant Jew, our father less so. She was kind of driving the religious education, so for us it was more a burden and an obligation when we were kids at that age."
- Joel Coen
(Related: Age, Education, Mother, Father, Burden, Driving, Kids, Obligation, Religious)
"Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature."
- Harold Coffin
(Related: Age, Nature, Time, Mother, Father, Middle age)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you!"
- George M. Cohan
(Related: Mother, Father, Sister, Ladies, Gentlemen)
"I'm immensely grateful for the precious gift my mother has given me. She is my hero today and every day."
- Steven Cojocaru
(Related: Mother, Day, Today)
"Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions."
- Edward Coke
(Related: Mother, Cause, Certainty, Quiet, Uncertainty)
"Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? The mother."
- Claudette Colbert
(Related: Mother, Grandparents)
"Ignorance is the mother of devotion."
- Dean Henry Cole
(Related: Mother, Devotion, Ignorance)
"When I was four years old, my mother owned some tenements in the Bronx."
- Cy Coleman
(Related: Mother, Old, Years)
"I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, 'Well if you go out and save your money.' So I went and got - I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I'd bring whatever I made."
- Ornette Coleman
(Related: Money, Mother)
"The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Love, Mother, Father, Heart, Light)
"A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Mother)
"I always sang when I was little and my father, who was a great influence on me, also had a wonderful voice. He and my mother really encouraged me to sing and play the piano. They were always very supportive."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Mother, Father, Influence, Play, Voice)
"I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon."
- Charles Colson
(Related: Nixon)
"Mother was a great force in her area of evangelism."
- Jessi Colter
(Related: Mother, Force)
"My mother's very proud of the name she gave me. She thought it sounded rhythmically better. It doesn't really make a difference to me what people call me, but since my mother calls me Holly Marie when she's angry, I prefer just my first name."
- Holly Marie Combs
(Related: Mother, Thought, People, Difference, First, Holly, Name)
"Everything changes as a mother. Yes, work has changed. The projects that I choose are even more important to me now. The world he's growing up in and the kind of stimulus that is out there; they are so precious and I'd do anything to protect him."
- Jennifer Connelly
(Related: Work, Mother, Growing up, Now, Projects, World)
"That MySpace is the story of the year. Everyone but my mother is on it."
- Dane Cook
(Related: Mother)
"But my mother and father were married when my mom was 20 and my dad was 24."
- Rachael Leigh Cook
(Related: Dad, Mom, Mother, Father)
"Well-behaved: he always speaks as if his mother might be listening."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Mother, Listening)
"Hatred of the mother is familiar, but the mother's hatred still comes as a surprise."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Mother, Hatred)
"My grandmother passed at 104. She sang and wrote songs until she passed."
- Rita Coolidge
(Related: Songs)
"I imagine a lot of people tune in simply to watch reporters get bitch-slapped by Mother Nature, and frankly, who can blame them?"
- Anderson Cooper
(Related: Nature, Mother, People, Blame)
"And I would really like to be a grandmother, but only when Felix or Emily meet the right person and are ready."
- Jilly Cooper
(Related: Right)
"I didn't grow up with my mother, and so losing her for real was like, some sort of latent childhood, some sort of unresolved issue. When she left for real, it was sort of like, I was done."
- Billy Corgan
(Related: Mother, Childhood, Losing)
"Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there."
- Robert Cormier
(Related: Family, Home, Life, Mother, Father)
"My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English."
- Eric Allin Cornell
(Related: Mother, Father, Engineering, English, School)
"Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco."
- Eric Allin Cornell
(Related: Mother, Sister, Brother, School)
"Yes, my mother was a singer, and my father played piano and keyboards. They were in a band together, though they also had regular jobs because they had kids and stuff like that."
- Caroline Corr
(Related: Mother, Father, Jobs, Kids)
"My father went into the armed service and I never saw my mother - I don't know what happened to her."
- Gregory Corso
(Related: Mother, Father, Service)
"As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by "survival of the fittest.""
- Bill Cosby
(Related: Mother, Brother, Past)
"The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters... and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult."
- Jacques Yves Cousteau
(Related: Environmental, Nature, Mother, Cure, Enemy, Job, Problems)
"Always a godmother, never a mother. That sucks. I've got to get me one of those little accessories."
- Courteney Cox
(Related: Mother)
"A vacation frequently means that the family goes away for a rest, accompanied by a mother who sees that the others get it."
- Marcelene Cox
(Related: Family, Mother, Rest, Vacation)
"My father was always telling himself no one was perfect, not even my mother."
- Broderick Crawford
(Related: Mother, Father)
"You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave."
- Quentin Crisp
(Related: Mother, Country, Fire, Grave, Open)
"My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it."
- Quentin Crisp
(Related: Mother, Father, World)
"My mother, Dorothy Watson, had met my father in a Greek class at Northwestern University."
- James Cronin
(Related: Mother, Father, Class, University)
"I didn't have anything to do with being born to my mother and father. But I had a lot to do with Kristin Shepard's notoriety. I'm proud of the work I did on Dallas."
- Mary Crosby
(Related: Work, Mother, Father, Being)
"I'd like to be a wife and mother. I guess I'll know Mr. Right when I meet him."
- Marcia Cross
(Related: Mother, Wife, Right)
"My mother and stepfather were married 43 years, so I have watched a long marriage. I feel like I had a very good role model for that. And, you know, it's just a number."
- Jamie Lee Curtis
(Related: Marriage, Mother, Years)
"I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging."
- Jamie Lee Curtis
(Related: Age, Life, Mother, People, Trying)
"I enlisted when I was a boy. The Navy looked after me like my mother. It fed me, took care of me and gave me wonderful opportunities."
- Tony Curtis
(Related: Mother, Care, Navy)
"I am so excited to let fans in on how important my relationship with my family is to me. I hope to motivate mothers and daughters to build lifetimes of memories together and inspire kids around the world to live their dreams."
- Miley Cyrus
(Related: Dreams, Family, Hope, Daughters, Fans, Kids, Memories, Mothers, World)
"I was so ugly my mother used to feed me with a sling shot."
- Rodney Dangerfield
(Related: Mother, Ugly)
"My mother had morning sickness after I was born."
- Rodney Dangerfield
(Related: Mother, Sickness)
"My mother never breast fed me, she told me she only liked me as a friend."
- Rodney Dangerfield
(Related: Mother, Friend)
"When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother."
- Rodney Dangerfield
(Related: Mother, Ugly)
"Mostly, I spend my time being a mother to my two children, working in my organic garden, raising masses of sweet peas, being passionately involved in conservation, recycling and solar energy."
- Blythe Danner
(Related: Time, Mother, Being, Children, Conservation, Energy, Garden, Recycling)
"My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood."
- Paula Danziger
(Related: Mother, Father, Thought, People, Childhood, Sarcastic)
"I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose."
- Clarence Darrow
(Related: God, Mother)
"I've played Henry Fonda's mother so often that, whenever we run into each other, I call him 'son' and he calls me 'Ma', just to save time."
- Jane Darwell
(Related: Time, Mother)
"Ask Mother for advice on breaking into show business."
- Jack Davenport
(Related: Business, Mother, Advice)
"Lorna was quite young when her mother died, and I think she's blocked out some of the memories. I talked to her a little bit about that, but I wasn't prepared to go around and poke and hurt her."
- Judy Davis
(Related: Mother, Hurt, Memories)
"Our mothers' generation fought so hard to change things and we're the first generation to benefit. And now you get girls in their twenties who say they're not feminists."
- Kristin Davis
(Related: Change, First, Girls, Mothers, Now)
"Later, my father died up in Marysville. So, my mother and I got in the car and came down to Hollywood."
- Marc Davis
(Related: Car, Mother, Father, Hollywood)
"I believe every child has the right to a mother and a father. Men and women are not the same. That's not to say they're not entitled to equal rights, but they are not the same."
- Mark Davis
(Related: Men, Women, Mother, Father, Rights)
"I felt that the best I could do for my father, and the best I could do for myself, and my mother and my family was to stay open to the experience, and learn whatever I could at every step of the way as it was going on."
- Patti Davis
(Related: Family, Experience, Mother, Father, Open)
"All the fascination of King Solomon's Mines seems to be behind those great mountains and this I may add is a bit of advance work for mother, an entering wedge to my disappearing from sight for years and years in the Congo."
- Richard H. Davis
(Related: Work, Mother, May, Mountains, Sight, Years)
"I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me."
- Sammy Davis, Jr.
(Related: Hollywood)
"I can always tell when the mother in law's coming to stay; the mice throw themselves on the traps."
- Les Dawson
(Related: Mother, Law)
"I saw six men kicking and punching the mother-in-law. My neighbour said 'Are you going to help?' I said 'No, six should be enough.'"
- Les Dawson
(Related: Men, Mother, Help)
"There were people I know that got upset that I kiss people. I kiss them for luck and love, that's all. That's what my mother did to me."
- Richard Dawson
(Related: Love, Kiss, Mother, People, Luck)
"You do stand alone sometimes. But my mother stood by me through all this."
- Morris Dees
(Related: Mother)
"My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is."
- Ellen DeGeneres
(Related: Day, Hell, Now, Walking)
"You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is."
- Ellen DeGeneres
(Related: Day, Hell, Today, Walking)
"I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her."
- Ellen DeGeneres
(Related: Mother, People)
"Then my mother was taken ill and died and my father took me to St. Mary's."
- Desmond Dekker
(Related: Mother, Father)
"We all know that television is better for women as they get into their 40s. You could be more three-dimensional, not just the wife or the mother."
- Dana Delany
(Related: Women, Mother, Wife, Television)
"The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills."
- Tom DeLay
(Related: Control, Birth control, Causes, Evolution, Kids, Mothers, Parents, Schools, Teaching, Violence, Youth)
"My mother had lots and lots of children who didn't survive."
- Dom DeLuise
(Related: Mother, Children)
"My mother opened a bank account for me when I made $60 on my first day of work as an extra. She's that kind of mother."
- Laura Dern
(Related: Work, Mother, Bank account, Day, First)
"I was raised by an actress, and I watched all those women turn 60 and ask, Shouldn't get face work? My mother and Anne Bancroft said, We're not going to fall into that."
- Laura Dern
(Related: Women, Mother, Work)
"Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had, Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism... to ward off threats to her own security and influence."
- Bernadette Devlin
(Related: Equality, Mother, Church, Conservatism, Force, Freedom, Influence, Ireland, Security)
"Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home."
- John Dewey
(Related: Home, Nature, Mother, Man)
"My mother is a walking miracle."
- Leonardo DiCaprio
(Related: Mother, Walking)
"My mother was against me being an actress - until I introduced her to Frank Sinatra."
- Angie Dickinson
(Related: Mother, Being)
"Mothers don't let your daughters grow up to be models unless you're present."
- Janice Dickinson
(Related: Daughters, Mothers, Present)
"Green is my favorite. And it's my favorite because it's the color of my wife's eyes, grass, trees, life, and money, and mother earth!"
- Casper Van Dien
(Related: Life, Money, Mother, Wife, Eyes, Favorite, Trees)
"My mother gave me this book called Feature Films at Used Car Prices by a guy named Rick Schmidt. I gotta credit the guy, cuz he gave me the most practical advice. It empowers you."
- Vin Diesel
(Related: Car, Mother, Advice, Credit)
"My mother-in-law had a pain beneath her left breast. Turned out to be a trick knee."
- Phyllis Diller
(Related: Mother, Pain)
"Well, I was about six or seven, and my mother and father separated."
- David Dinkins
(Related: Mother, Father)
"My mother came here to New York. She and my grandmother were domestics, cooking, cleaning for other people."
- David Dinkins
(Related: Mother, People, Cooking)
"The mob is the mother of tyrants."
- Diogenes
(Related: Mother, Mob)
"I want to be more successful as a mother than I am in show business."
- Celine Dion
(Related: Business, Mother, Successful, Want)
"I wanted to share my life story and honor my roots. I am very proud of my family and mother."
- Rocco DiSpirito
(Related: Family, Life, Mother, Honor)
"Silence is the mother of truth."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Mother, Truth, Silence)
"An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Mother, Books, Children)
"Diligence is the mother of good fortune."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Mother, Diligence, Fortune)
"You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child."
- Dogen
(Related: Mother, Study)
"I find celebrity status difficult to bear when I am in the company of my mother."
- Phil Donahue
(Related: Mother, Celebrity, Company)
"And really, the basis, I think, of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education."
- Sam Donaldson
(Related: Education, Success, Mother, Today, Want)
"But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age."
- Sam Donaldson
(Related: Age, War, Time, Mother, December, News, Years)
"My mother did all she could to control me, but at age 14 she sent me to a military school."
- Sam Donaldson
(Related: Age, Mother, Control, Military, School)
"My mother gave me a push. If I hadn't had her, maybe I wouldn't have had the push. If I hadn't gone to military school, maybe I wouldn't have decided to get with the program. Maybe I'd be running a bulldozer, rather than going on and doing something more."
- Sam Donaldson
(Related: Mother, Military, Running, School)
"Let's take care of mothers and infants first, and then let's see what's left over for everybody over 50. I'm over 50. If I get sick, I would rather have money spent on children before it's spent on me."
- Richard Dooling
(Related: Money, Care, Children, First, Mothers)
"My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Mother, Father, Feeling, Learning, Parents)
"I lost my mother when I was very young, and my father when I was in college."
- Roma Downey
(Related: Mother, Father, College)
"I'd love to do some bedtime stories for kids or that kind of thing. But with the demands of the shooting schedule and balancing the demands of being a single mother, it's a wonder you can squeeze in anything."
- Roma Downey
(Related: Love, Mother, Being, Kids, Wonder)
"What is free time? I'm a single mother. My free moments are filled with loving my little girl."
- Roma Downey
(Related: Time, Mother, Moments)
"Even my great grand-mother did impressions."
- Julia Louis Dreyfus
"I know I can handle dramatic roles, but I don't think I should have to play a young mother on crack to prove it."
- Hilary Duff
(Related: Mother, Play)
"When my children were born, I didn't have them baptized because I felt baptism was about erasing Original Sin - something the Church said children got from their mother - and I absolutely refused to believe women carry Original Sin."
- Olympia Dukakis
(Related: Women, Mother, Church, Children, Sin)
"When I was a kid, I'd kneel down at the side of my bed every night before I went to sleep, and my mother and I would say a Greek prayer to the Virgin Mary."
- Olympia Dukakis
(Related: Mother, Bed, Night, Prayer, Sleep)
"I kind of like the position of being the fair-haired savior of my mother."
- Patty Duke
(Related: Mother, Being)
"My mother's passion for something more, to write a different destiny for a dirt-poor farmer's daughter, was to shape my entire life."
- Faye Dunaway
(Related: Life, Daughter, Mother, Destiny, Passion)
"With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood."
- Isadora Duncan
(Related: Glory, Motherhood)
"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa - not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is 'you're going to make choices; you're going to challenge; you're going to say why not; you're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before."
- Anita Dunn
(Related: Mother, People, Challenge, Choices, Favorite)
"But it's also because of something personal. My mother and father met while playing chess, so I've always had a fondness for the game. If it weren't for chess, I might not be here."
- Dorothy Dunnett
(Related: Mother, Father, Chess)
"My father knew the charming side of my mother, and my mother thought that he was attentive and pleasant and was an architect, which was a respectable profession, but I don't think that they actually got to know one another deeply."
- Christopher Durang
(Related: Mother, Father, Thought, Profession)
"Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory."
- Will Durant
(Related: Time, Memory, Mothers)
"I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met."
- Marguerite Duras
(Related: Mother, People, Madness, Mothers)
"I never did say that you can't be a nice guy and win. I said that if I was playing third base and my mother rounded third with the winning run, I'd trip her up."
- Leo Durocher
(Related: Mother, Winning)
"My parents divorced when I was born, and my mother is a political science professor, like a feminist Mormon, which is sort of an oxymoron."
- Eliza Dushku
(Related: Science, Mother, Mormon, Parents)
"My mother would take groups of students to different countries and always brought us along, so by the time I was 10, I had been to Russia, China, Nicaragua and several other countries."
- Eliza Dushku
(Related: Time, Mother, Countries, Russia, Students)
"Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so."
- Andrea Dworkin
(Related: Mother, Earth, Forbidden, Humanity, Symbol, Universe, Woman)
"Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences."
- Freeman Dyson
(Related: Life, Technology, Mother, God, Gifts)
"I think I'm a fan of people who were brave, my aunt, my grandmother, those are my heroes."
- George Eads
(Related: People, Heroes)
"Mother Firefly is the kind of character I've always wanted to play. She's larger than life, terribly tragic, and capable of a lot of love."
- Leslie Easterbrook
(Related: Love, Life, Mother, Character, Play)
"The Indian was a religious man from his mother's womb."
- Charles Eastman
(Related: Mother, Man, Religious)
"Until women learn to want economic independence, and until they work out a way to get this independence without denying themselves the joys of love and motherhood, it seems to me feminism has no roots."
- Crystal Eastman
(Related: Love, Women, Work, Feminism, Independence, Motherhood, Want)
"My mother has never been involved in my professional life. I am very close to my mother but we keep it on a mother-daughter basis and not a work-related basis."
- Sheena Easton
(Related: Life, Work, Mother)
"Proving I'm a good mother is the one achievement I'm most proud of. It's brought out the best in me."
- Sheena Easton
(Related: Mother, Achievement)
"I'm terrible at relationships. I consider myself to be smart and a good mother but it's taken me this long to realise you don't have to marry a guy after three days or dump him."
- Sheena Easton
(Related: Mother, Relationships)
"Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother's home."
- Shirin Ebadi
(Related: Home, Women, Mother, Culture, Man, Mind, Victims)
"The film is about Joe discovering who his mother and father are and his relationship with them, and the identity crisis he goes through once he finds out who his parents are."
- Christopher Eccleston
(Related: Mother, Father, Crisis, Film, Identity, Parents)
"I used to listen to the soap operas with my grandmother."
- Bob Edwards
"They took my mother's stomach out six months ago."
- Dave Eggers
(Related: Mother, Months)
"Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent."
- Barbara Ehrenreich
(Related: Thought, Career)
"Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face."
- George Eliot
(Related: Life, Mother, Waking)
"If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it.""
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Mother, Baby, Being, Desire, Hatred)
"When I got back to my father and mother and was sitting up there in our tepee, my face was still all puffed and my legs and arms were badly swollen; but I felt good all over and wanted to get right up and run around."
- Black Elk
(Related: Mother, Father, Right)
"And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father."
- Black Elk
(Related: Mother, Father, People, Children)
"I've always been so apathetic. I figured, OK, maybe the world is going to fall down around me. Now I want to make a better world... that's motherhood."
- Cass Elliot
(Related: Motherhood, Now, Want, World)
"I got a mother who's very strong after taking the whippings that she took from my father."
- Missy Elliot
(Related: Mother, Father)
"I love my mother. She's my first love. She has been through a lot and is a sole survivor."
- Missy Elliot
(Related: Love, Mother, First, First love)
"The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny."
- Albert Ellis
(Related: Life, Mother, Control, Blame, Destiny, Ecology, President, Problems, Years)
"As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years."
- James Ellroy
(Related: Dad, Mother, Thought, Crime, Obsession, Years)
"My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career."
- James Ellroy
(Related: Mother, Character, Career, Giving, Will, World, Writing)
"The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you're 10 years old, and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case."
- James Ellroy
(Related: Time, Mother, Truth, Fact, Hate, Murder, Old, Years)
"I love my mother dearly, but it wouldn't be suitable for me to live with her all the time."
- Keith Emerson
(Related: Love, Time, Mother)
"There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Mother, Sleep)
"Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Mother, Enthusiasm, Effort, Nothing)
"Men are what their mothers made them."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Men, Mothers)
"What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you."
- Nora Ephron
(Related: Mother, Cooking)
"My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you."
- Nora Ephron
(Related: Mother, Cooking)
"My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next."
- Nora Ephron
(Related: Life, Mother, Day, Potential)
"I can remember when I was a baby and my mother was there watching the show. I went and bought 100 episodes and watched them. I respect it so much that the sitcom itself and Ed Norton; I'm not playing Ed Norton but my version of it, cause I'm a black man."
- Mike Epps
(Related: Mother, Baby, Cause, Man, Respect)
"Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another s."
- Desiderius Erasmus
(Related: Men, Nature, Mother, Evil, Thoughtful)
"You want a lesson? I'll give you a lesson. How about a geography lesson? My father's from Puerto Rico. My mother's from El Salvador. And neither one of those is Mexico."
- Jennifer Esposito
(Related: Mother, Father, Geography, Want)
"Sometimes my mother had difficulty communicating with me about certain topics."
- Gloria Estefan
(Related: Mother, Difficulty)
"My mother had a beautiful, soothing voice that made me melt."
- Gloria Estefan
(Related: Mother, Voice)
"Motherhood is... difficult and... rewarding."
- Gloria Estefan
(Related: Motherhood)
"Better a serpent than a stepmother!"
- Euripides
"I played with dolls until I was 15. My mother encouraged it because my older sister got married when she was 15, so Mom thought that the longer I stayed with dolls, the better."
- Linda Evans
(Related: Mom, Mother, Sister, Thought)
"My mother took my picture to a model agency and the rest is history."
- Angie Everhart
(Related: History, Mother, Rest)
"I watched my mother waste her life on housework and swore I'd never do that. Dave does the cooking."
- Siobhan Fahey
(Related: Life, Mother, Cooking, Housework, Waste)
"I'm a hopeless mother; a hopeless wife; I have to try harder. I'm just a pathetic case history, really."
- Siobhan Fahey
(Related: History, Mother, Wife)
"They said I was a married mother of two but the record sounded like an indie album and they didn't know how to market it! This country is incredibly sexist, as is the music and media industry."
- Siobhan Fahey
(Related: Music, Mother, Country, Media)
"Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion."
- Oriana Fallaci
(Related: Mother, Abortion, Pity)
"When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste."
- Oriana Fallaci
(Related: Mother, Father)
"That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always?"
- Frances Farmer
(Related: God, People, Children, Fathers, Mothers)
"Necessity, the mother of invention."
- George Farquhar
(Related: Mother, Invention, Necessity)
"Because wherever I am today, I still owe it to God and I owe it to two men - the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X and of course, two very special women, my mother and my wife."
- Louis Farrakhan
(Related: Men, Women, Mother, Wife, God, Today)
"I used to love to play dress-up, where you get your mother's or your grandmother's dresses and high heels."
- Suzanne Farrell
(Related: Love, Mother, Dress, Play)
"That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions."
- Chow Yun Fat
(Related: Mother, Language)
"If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies."
- William Faulkner
(Related: Mother, Ladies, Old, Will, Worth, Writer)
"I can't think why mothers love them. All babies do is leak at both ends."
- Douglas Feaver
(Related: Love, Babies, Mothers)
"I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father."
- Jules Feiffer
(Related: Mother, Father, Contempt, Opinions, Speech)
"My mother is looking forward to it even more than me! I'll be showing her the bright lights of New York."
- Tom Felton
(Related: Mother)
"My mother's been married many, many times and grew up believing in love like that. It's remarkable."
- Sherilyn Fenn
(Related: Love, Mother, Remarkable)
"The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint."
- James Fenton
(Related: Mother)
"And I have to tell you as a grandmother, I worry about the fact that my grandchildren are going to be paying for all the spending, including military spending, that has gone on and the tax cuts that have come through."
- Geraldine Ferraro
(Related: Fact, Tax, Military, Tax cuts, Worry)
"My last son is leaving to go to college; my grandchildren are being born. My mother is living with me."
- Sally Field
(Related: Mother, Son, Being, College, Living)
"The man in our society is the breadwinner; the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Society, Mother, Wife, Man, Woman)
"We've accumulated a lot of things over the years and many things from our grandmother. Hopefully it'll be all right. I really don't want to cry, but I can't help it."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Help, Right, Want, Years)
"Everybody's looking for the niche to make the difference. Some people think they see the mother lode in the beautiful people, especially the vote of the beautiful women."
- Suzanne Fields
(Related: Women, Mother, People, Difference, Vote)
"When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life."
- Ralph Fiennes
(Related: Life, Mother, Buddhist, Beliefs, Catholicism, End)
"I'm convinced my mother only had sex eight times."
- Linda Fiorentino
(Related: Sex, Mother)
"My mother taught me about the power of inspiration and courage, and she did it with a strength and a passion that I wish could be bottled."
- Carly Fiorina
(Related: Power, Mother, Inspiration, Courage, Strength, Passion)
"I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year."
- Colin Firth
(Related: Mother, America)
"My grandmother was a minister as well, which was not that common in the 1930s."
- Colin Firth
"A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnessary."
- Dorothy Canfield Fisher
(Related: Mother)
"I want to thank my mother and my father for teaching me to have a dream. You are seeing my dream come true."
- Louise Fletcher
(Related: Mother, Father, Dream, Teaching, Want)
"Night is the mother of thoughts."
- John Florio
(Related: Mother, Thoughts, Night)
"I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father."
- Carlisle Floyd
(Related: Mother, Father)
"My mother killed herself when I was 12. I won't complete that relationship. But I can try to understand her."
- Jane Fonda
(Related: Mother)
"I wasn't really aware that my father was working for quite a while. I thought it was my mother who had all the money!"
- Peter Fonda
(Related: Mother, Father, Thought)
"Brando's a family friend. His mother gave my father a shot to be in a play at the Omaha Community Playhouse. That was the first production he was in."
- Peter Fonda
(Related: Family, Mother, Father, Friend, Community, First, Play, Production)
"My mother keeps me abreast of all the hometown things."
- Faith Ford
(Related: Mother)
"There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother, and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of things."
- Gerald R. Ford
(Related: Family, Government, Mother, Father, Children, Commitment)
"My mother was watching on television and she doesn't want me to hurt anyone."
- George Foreman
(Related: Mother, Hurt, Television, Want)
"By the time I was four, I would walk around the corner and wait at a local streetcar stop, get on the streetcar with somebody who looked like they could be my mother and go to the end of the line."
- Maureen Forrester
(Related: Time, Mother, End)
"My mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman with a lovely voice who hated housework, hated cooking even more and loved her children. She was always arranging church activities such as a bazaar."
- Maureen Forrester
(Related: Mother, Church, Children, Cooking, Housework, Voice, Woman)
"When I started to sing, my mother would have me engaged to perform at the Women's Christian Temperance Union national or annual meetings. I would hate doing this because I wanted to play baseball or go off skiing."
- Maureen Forrester
(Related: Women, Mother, Christian, Baseball, Hate, Meetings, Play, Temperance)
"I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Mothers, Nations)
"At the moment, my mother is the only one left in Glasgow, although it's certainly my home."
- Bill Forsyth
(Related: Home, Mother)
"Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles."
- Jodie Foster
(Related: Work, Mother)
"Changing a diaper is a lot like getting a present from your grandmother - you're not sure what you've got but you're pretty sure you're not going to like it."
- Jeff Foxworthy
(Related: Present, Pretty)
"I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English."
- Connie Francis
(Related: Day, English, Songs, Word)
"Diligence is the mother of good luck."
- Benjamin Franklin
(Related: Mother, Diligence, Luck)
"My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor."
- Antonia Fraser
(Related: Education, Women, Mother, Being, Woman)
"My mother was a politician in my formative years."
- Antonia Fraser
(Related: Mother, Years)
"My mother, who was quite sharp when I was young, became utterly mild."
- Antonia Fraser
(Related: Mother)
"My mother always used to say, 'There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.'"
- Donald Freed
(Related: Peace, Mother)
"I was going to shave it. It went in two parts. I got a bob first but it kept falling all over my face. Then it was off, short. The main reason it was long was because my mother cut it short when I was little and I was trying to make up for that."
- Cathy Freeman
(Related: Mother, First, Reason, Trying)
"It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost."
- Anna Freud
(Related: Mother, Feelings, Children, Emotions)
"If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Life, Success, Mother, Confidence, Feeling, Man)
"A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Life, Mother, Favorite, Feeling, Man)
"When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself."
- Nancy Friday
(Related: Mother, Eyes, Woman)
"The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children."
- Nancy Friday
(Related: Mother, Father, Gratitude, Children, Debt, Parents)
"Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still."
- Nancy Friday
(Related: Mother, Negative)
"The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself."
- Nancy Friday
(Related: Mother)
"It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all."
- Betty Friedan
(Related: Home, Men, Society, HusbSon, Neighbors, Woman)
"Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth."
- Anna Friel
(Related: Mother, Baby, Film, Future, Irish, Old, Play)
"Being a mother gives you an incredible feeling of empowerment, you think if I can go through such pain and that level of sleep and still operate and not be grumpy you can do anything. It can be quite scary, you can't function your brain, forget your vocabulary."
- Anna Friel
(Related: Mother, Being, Empowerment, Feeling, Forget, Pain, Sleep, Vocabulary)
"The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent."
- Erich Fromm
(Related: Love, Mother, Help, Sense)
"Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved."
- Erich Fromm
(Related: Love, Peace, Mother)
"The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Mother, Father, Son, Republican)
"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Love, Mother, Father)
"A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Mother, Fool, Man, Woman, Years)
"Of all the roles I've played, none has been as fulfilling as being a mother."
- Annette Funicello
(Related: Mother, Being)
"My grandmother told stories; she was very good at that."
- Cornelia Funke
"My first husband, yes, I eloped with him from Hungary against my mother's wishes."
- Eva Gabor
(Related: Mother, HusbFirst, Wishes)
"The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French."
- Charlotte Gainsbourg
(Related: Mother, Father, Daughter, Being, English)
"Mothers are the people who love us for no good reason. And those of us who are mothers know it's the most exquisite love of all."
- Maggie Gallagher
(Related: Love, People, Mothers, Reason)
"If Romeo and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it."
- Richard Le Gallienne
(Related: Blame, Fathers, Mothers, Tragedy, World)
"Both my mother and father were very supportive of any career move any of us wanted to make."
- James Gandolfini
(Related: Mother, Father, Career)
"Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn't work."
- John Garamendi
(Related: Nature, Work, Mother, Reality)
"My mother couldn't have been happier when I said I was moving to New York."
- Victor Garber
(Related: Mother)
"When I go home my mother still makes me take out the garbage."
- Nomar Garciaparra
(Related: Home, Mother)
"I recently saw the movie about Ray Charles, and there's a scene where he falls down and the mother doesn't help him. She says, I don't want anyone to treat you like a cripple. I've fallen down before, and Molly will say, get up and just go."
- Teri Garr
(Related: Mother, Help, Want, Will)
"Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible."
- Marion C. Garretty
(Related: Love, Mother, Being)
"To be sure a stepmother to a girl is a different thing to a second wife to a man!"
- Elizabeth Gaskell
(Related: Wife)
"The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Mother, Father, Brother, African)
"I am truly my mother's son."
- David Geffen
(Related: Mother, Son)
"My mother taught me to love my work. I learned everything about business from her."
- David Geffen
(Related: Business, Love, Work, Mother)
"My mother and father were fantastic, very active. I find it difficult to say this, but I'm quite a loving person and I've always been loving to my friends. In the long run, that pays off. I'm very interested in other people, and if you are, they're interested in you."
- Boy George
(Related: Mother, Father, People, Friends)
"Once vigorous measures appear to be the only means left of bringing the Americans to a due submission to the mother country, the colonies will submit."
- George III
(Related: Mother, Americans, Country, Will)
"My father was frightened of his mother; I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me."
- King George V
(Related: Mother, Father, Children)
"The Dalai Lama said that he thinks mother's love is the best symbol for love and compassion, because it is totally disinterested."
- Richard Gere
(Related: Love, Mother, Compassion, Symbol)
"Nicolette, Kendalle, and Alexandra are my children. Their mother, Cynthia Beck, and I, love them very much."
- Gordon Getty
(Related: Love, Mother, Children)
"No one knew me until I met my wife Lulu. Lulu's mother used to ask, Which one is Maurice? For six months she thought Lulu was dating Barry."
- Maurice Gibb
(Related: Dating, Mother, Wife, Thought, Months)
"Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms."
- Khalil Gibran
(Related: Mother, Knowledge, Atoms, Self)
"When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution."
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(Related: Mother, Evolution, Race, Right, World)
"My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands."
- Hermione Gingold
(Related: Time, Mother, Father)
"My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the '40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S."
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(Related: Mother, Lady, Girls, Growing up, Law)
"My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent."
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(Related: Mother, Lady)
"Music was around in my family in two ways. My mother would occasionally sing to me, but I was mostly stimulated by the classical music my father had left behind. I had an ear for music, I suppose, so that's what began my interest in music."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Family, Music, Mother, Father, Interest)
"Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No formal training."
- Fay Godwin
(Related: Mother, Father, American, Artist, Children, Germany, London, Photography, Schools, Training, World)
"I am the person who is a mother against drunk driver."
- Tracey Gold
(Related: Mother)
"I love acting. But I love being a mother. To be a full mother and a full person, you have to do what you love, and that's acting. But I like the best of both worlds."
- Tracey Gold
(Related: Love, Mother, Acting, Being)
"After the crash happened, I was so humiliated and embarrassed. I thought of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, that they must hate me."
- Tracey Gold
(Related: Thought, Hate, Mothers)
"That's the thing about Mother Nature, she really doesn't care what economic bracket you're in."
- Whoopi Goldberg
(Related: Nature, Mother, Care)
"I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha."
- Arthur Golden
(Related: Work, Mother, Father, College, Culture, Famous, Language, Man, School)
"Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction."
- Arthur Golden
(Related: Time, Mother, Thought, Fiction, Living, Reading, Writing)
"Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?"
- Emma Goldman
(Related: Mother, Morality, Motherhood)
"The first snowball I froze was put in my mother's deep freeze when I was in my early 20s."
- Andy Goldsworthy
(Related: Mother, Deep, First)
"You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son."
- Witold Gombrowicz
(Related: Love, Son, Mother, Ugly)
"As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job."
- Jane Goodall
(Related: Money, Mother, Dream, College, England, Job, School, University)
"We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?"
- Ellen Goodman
(Related: Fathers, Mothers)
"Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children."
- Maxim Gorky
(Related: Children, Future, Mothers)
"God hears a mother's prayer."
- Victoria Gotti
(Related: God, Mother, Prayer)
"My Mother is Swedish and my Father is Scottish, he played for Charlton in the 1960's and was in the Army, he captained the British forces team. We then moved to S.A. because a lot of players did that at the time."
- Richard Gough
(Related: Time, Mother, Father, Army)
"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
- Francisco de Goya
(Related: Mother, Fantasy, Reason, United)
"Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children."
- Billy Graham
(Related: God, Mother, Character, Christian, Children, Influence)
"One of the things I like about the show is it redefines the idea of what it is to be a mother, which at its most basic level is to take care of a child. It doesn't mean you have to look like the ladies in the Lysol commercials."
- Lauren Graham
(Related: Mother, Idea, Care, Ladies)
"In the past, when I'd recorded during a break in a tour, it was so easy to sing, because I felt strong. Also, like so many new mothers, I wasn't getting a lot of sleep, and sleeping is such a huge part of being able to sing."
- Amy Grant
(Related: Being, Mothers, Past, Sleep)
"I don't run democracy. I train troops to defend democracy and I happen to be their surrogate father and mother as well as their commanding general."
- Alfred M. Gray
(Related: Mother, Father, Democracy, Troops)
"I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave."
- Spalding Gray
(Related: Age, Mother, Grave, Suicide, Waiting)
"My mother's incredibly giving, almost too giving at times. And, my dad is a real logical person. He's got logic for every situation. They've been married for 24 years, so there was that stability, also. I really learned to think on my own at a very young age."
- Brian Austin Green
(Related: Age, Dad, Mother, Giving, Logic, Stability, Years)
"My mother did movies from the New Wave, but I was quite shocked I didn't know much about that period. Bernado showed us film of the demonstrations of the time."
- Eva Green
(Related: Movies, Time, Mother, Film)
"My father is Swedish and my mother is French."
- Eva Green
(Related: Mother, Father)
"I'm worried because of my mother, she's going to see my performance and she's quite hard. She's going to see me naked. And my Dad, woah. Yeah, they're going to see me like a woman, you know?"
- Eva Green
(Related: Dad, Mother, Performance, Woman)
"I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as seldom as my mother could arrange it."
- Joseph Greenberg
(Related: Family, Mother, Father)
"If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide."
- Meg Greenfield
(Related: Mother, Being, First, Opponents, Press, Will, Years)
"The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement."
- Germaine Greer
(Related: Love, Mother, Song)
"Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother."
- Germaine Greer
(Related: Mother, Father, Psychoanalysis)
"When you have a good mother and no father, God kind of sits in. It's not enough, but it helps."
- Dick Gregory
(Related: God, Mother, Father)
"I have friends who are going through chemotherapy, and they make the darkest, most hideous cancer jokes you've ever heard."
- Kathy Griffin
(Related: Cancer, Friends, Jokes)
"I was baptized alongside my mother when I was 8 years old. Since then I have tried to walk a Christian life. And now that I'm getting older I realize that I'm walking even closer with my God."
- Andy Griffith
(Related: God, Life, Mother, Christian, Now, Old, Walking, Years)
"I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer."
- Bill Griffith
(Related: Mother, Father, Army, Career, Man, Writer)
"You must be ready to give up everything, not only material attachments but also human attachments - father, mother, wife, children - everything that you have. But the one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self."
- Bede Griffiths
(Related: Mother, Father, Wife, Children, Self)
"The inspiration came suddenly again to surrender to the Mother. It was quite unexpected: And so somehow I made a surrender to the Mother. Then I had an experience of overwhelming love. Waves of love sort of flowed into me."
- Bede Griffiths
(Related: Experience, Love, Mother, Inspiration, Surrender)
"I think the Mother is gradually revealing itself to me and taking over. But it is not the Mother alone. It is the Mother and the Father, the male and the female, sort of gradually having their marriage."
- Bede Griffiths
(Related: Marriage, Mother, Father)
"There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son."
- Franz Grillparzer
(Related: Home, Mother, Son)
"I appeal to you, my friends, as mothers: are you willing to enslave your children? You stare back with horror and indignation at such questions. But why, if slavery is not wrong to those upon whom it is imposed?"
- Angelina Grimke
(Related: Children, Friends, Horror, Questions, Slavery, Wrong)
"My mother had always taught me to write about my feelings instead of sharing really personal things with others, so I spent many evenings writing in my diary, eating everything in the kitchen and waiting for Mr. Wrong to call."
- Cathy Guisewite
(Related: Mother, Feelings, Eating, Kitchen, Sharing, Waiting, Writing, Wrong)
"Mothers send strips to daughters to make a point. Daughters smack strips down on the breakfast table to make a point. My own mom sometimes cuts a strip out and sends it to me to make sure I understand her."
- Cathy Guisewite
(Related: Mom, Daughters, Mothers)
"Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups."
- Cathy Guisewite
(Related: Food, Love, Career, Guilt, Mothers)
"Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."
- Albert Szent Gyorgyi
(Related: Life, Mother, Water)
"Investigations during the last few decades have brought hydrogen instead of carbon, and instead of CO2 water, the mother of all life, into the foreground."
- Albert Szent Gyorgyi
(Related: Life, Mother, Water)
"My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Medical, Mother, Public, School, Woman)
"My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify."
- Jessica Hagedorn
(Related: Imagination, Identity)
"Becoming a mother has helped make me a tougher, stronger writer."
- Jessica Hagedorn
(Related: Mother, Writer)
"I miss my mother very, very much."
- Paul Haggis
(Related: Mother)
"My dad used to flush my mother's head down the toilet. I was so screwed up."
- Jessica Hahn
(Related: Dad, Mother)
"A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy, the smile that accepts a lover before words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first born babe, and assures it of a mother's love."
- Thomas Chandler Haliburton
(Related: Love, Mother, Envy, First, Smile, Smiles, Woman, Words)
"My mother said it was simple to keep a man, you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. I said I'd hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit."
- Jerry Hall
(Related: Mother, Care, Kitchen, Living, Man)
"My mother is a survivor who's had a lot of things happen in her life that have been very trying."
- Michael C. Hall
(Related: Life, Mother, Trying)
"Obviously Victoria and Mel B have become mothers and there is a part of me that wants to be a mum."
- Geri Halliwell
(Related: Mothers)
"Of the thousands of people, celebrated and unknown, who have sat before my camera, I am often asked who was the most difficult subject, or the easiest, or which picture is my favorite. This last question is like asking a mother which child she likes the most."
- Philippe Halsman
(Related: Mother, People, Favorite, Question)
"Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race."
- Johann G. Hamann
(Related: Poetry, Mother, Race)
"My mother stopped working when she had my brother. She was a full time mom until I started getting heavily into ice skating lessons, and it got to the point where they really needed my mom to earn an income."
- Dorothy Hamill
(Related: Mom, Time, Mother, Brother, Income)
"I hated to read. My mother could not get me to read. I'm going through the same thing with my daughter now. I love to read now, but I don't remember reading."
- Dorothy Hamill
(Related: Love, Mother, Daughter, Now, Reading)
"My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer."
- Jan Hammer
(Related: Mother, Jazz, Today)
"My view on issues is based on common sense, and my experience as a mother of four children, as a sole parent, and as a businesswoman running a fish and chip shop."
- Pauline Hanson
(Related: Experience, Mother, Children, Common sense, Fish, Running)
"Fear is the mother of foresight."
- Thomas Hardy
(Related: Mother, Fear, Foresight)
"It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life."
- Augustus Hare
(Related: Life, Babies, Conceit, Importance, Intellect, Mothers)
"Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it."
- Augustus Hare
(Related: Mother, Nonsense, Old, Talking)
"A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt fated support them through great actions."
- Augustus Hare
(Related: Mother, Enthusiasm, Actions, Children, May, Support, World)
"You make sacrifices to become a mother, but you really find yourself and your soul."
- Mariska Hargitay
(Related: Mother, Soul)
"When a woman gives birth to a child, the child needs to be able to digest the mother's milk; but when this child is old enough to begin to eat other foods, there is some switching off of this ability to consume milk."
- Marvin Harris
(Related: Mother, Ability, Needs, Old, Woman)
"Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched."
- Paul Harris
(Related: Sympathy, Motherhood)
"My mother raised me in the church. I was not allowed to stay home on Sunday; there was no option. I sang in the choir all the way up until I went to college."
- Steve Harvey
(Related: Home, Mother, Church, College)
"I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Mother)
"My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Mother, Play, Tennis)
"My mother loved the Bible."
- Goldie Hawn
(Related: Mother, Bible)
"I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence."
- Seamus Heaney
(Related: Mother, Father, World)
"My mother-in-law was with me during all four of my births and when she was sitting next to me holding my hand during the cesareans, well, I craved that."
- Patricia Heaton
(Related: Mother)
"I don't remember my mother ever playing with me. And she was a perfectly good mother. But she had to do the laundry and clean the house and do the grocery shopping."
- Patricia Heaton
(Related: Mother)
"To have gone through so much work to heal myself and have my mother not acknowledge in any way that she was sorry for what had happened to me, broke my heart."
- Anne Heche
(Related: Work, Mother, Heart)
"And for anyone who ever thought that Ellen and I broke it off because of sexuality, you couldn't be more mistaken. And for anyone who thought my mother's prayers had anything to do with me marrying a man, forget it."
- Anne Heche
(Related: Mother, Thought, Forget, Man, Sexuality)
"I told my mother at about the seventh year of therapy that I had been abused sexually by my father, and she hung up the phone on me."
- Anne Heche
(Related: Mother, Father, Therapy)
"Babies don't need fathers, but mothers do. Someone who is taking care of a baby needs to be taken care of."
- Amy Heckerling
(Related: Babies, Baby, Care, Fathers, Mothers, Needs)
"My mother thinks I could have even run a larger company."
- Christie Hefner
(Related: Mother, Company)
"I just cleared the slate and thought of her as a mother and went from there."
- Marg Helgenberger
(Related: Mother, Thought)
"I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays."
- Beth Henley
(Related: Mother, Community, Theatre)
"Basically it's the core story. About a guy having an affair with the mother of the girl he falls in love with."
- Buck Henry
(Related: Love, Mother)
"Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn't interest you, don't do it - I would have made a terrible mother."
- Katharine Hepburn
(Related: Mother, Being, Housewife, Interest, Job, World)
"Night is the mother of counsels."
- George Herbert
(Related: Mother, Night)
"Our father died when we were very young, so our mother raised six kids. We saw the world filtered through her eyes, being a minority woman raising six kids."
- Gilbert Hernandez
(Related: Mother, Father, Being, Eyes, Kids, Minority, Woman, World)
"My mother's a secretary; my father's an electrician in a mining company."
- Eva Herzigova
(Related: Mother, Father, Company)
"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother."
- Theodore Hesburgh
(Related: Love, Mother, Father, Children)
"A day is sometimes our mother, sometimes our stepmother."
- Hesiod
(Related: Mother, Day)
"And some of what we're doing in Government even now, some of the welfare reform programs that are helping lone mothers come into work are based on things that were very new under the Labour Government in the eighties."
- Patricia Hewitt
(Related: Government, Work, Mothers, Now, Reform, Welfare)
"Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother."
- Patricia Highsmith
(Related: Humor, Mother, Elegance)
"But, as my mother used to tell me, two wrongs don't make a right. But I soon figured out that three left turns do."
- Jim Hightower
(Related: Mother, Right, Wrongs)
"My mother keeps things in perspective for me. She makes me realize that the acting I do and love is no more important than what one of my brothers does-he works in a shoe repair shop. If my career ever tapers off, I'll go to college."
- Dana Hill
(Related: Love, Mother, Acting, Brothers, Career, College, Perspective)
"That strong mother doesn't tell her cub, Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you. She says, Toughen up, this is reality we are living in."
- Lauryn Hill
(Related: Mother, Son, Living, Reality)
"When I was 4 my mother got divorced and we were very close to each other. I always wanted to be with her. She took me everywhere. When she went for dinner with friends or when they had meetings at the tennis club, I was always there."
- Martina Hingis
(Related: Mother, Friends, Meetings, Tennis)
"Until I got married, when I used to go out, my mother said good bye to me as though I was emigrating."
- Thora Hird
(Related: Mother)
"Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy."
- Thomas Hobbes
(Related: Mother, Leisure, Philosophy)
"Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself."
- Eric Hoffer
(Related: Mother, Giving)
"The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody."
- Eric Hoffer
(Related: Mother, Man, Misery, Old, Woman)
"Mothers always find ways to fit in the work - but then when you're working, you feel that you should be spending time with your children and then when you're with your children, you're thinking about working."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Time, Work, Children, Mothers, Thinking)
"I have three brothers and they're all into computers. They're all intellects. My mother would pay me a quarter a page to read a book and I couldn't make 50 cents. I just couldn't do it."
- Josh Holloway
(Related: Computers, Mother, Brothers)
"The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: Men, Religion, Women, Key, Mothers, World)
"My own mother always taught me that fairness was a family value - I think equal pay is about fairness for everyone."
- Mike Honda
(Related: Family, Mother, Value)
"I wanted to make a human monster. His name is Coffin Baby. The idea is based on a group of people from Pasadena whose names I can't mention. His mother died and during the funeral, this baby came out of her in the coffin."
- Tobe Hooper
(Related: Mother, People, Idea, Baby, Name, Names)
"When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'."
- Tom Hooper
(Related: Dad, Mother, Father, Being, Growing up, May)
"Well, I'm half Australian, half English and I live in London. That is the only reason I came upon this story. My Australian mother, Meredith Hooper, was invited in late 2007 by some Australian friends to make up a token Australian audience in a tiny fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called 'The King's Speech.'"
- Tom Hooper
(Related: Mother, English, Friends, London, Play, Reading, Reason, Speech, Theater)
"My mother taught me that when you stand in the truth and someone tells a lie about you, don't fight it."
- Whitney Houston
(Related: Mother, Truth, Lie, Fight)
"When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I'd be alone a lot. Basically we all are. Loneliness comes with life."
- Whitney Houston
(Related: Life, Mother, Loneliness)
"My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland."
- Alan Hovhaness
(Related: Family, Mother, Old, Scotland, State)
"If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers."
- Edward W. Howe
(Related: Home, Time, Children, Mothers, Schools)
"A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it."
- William Dean Howells
(Related: Mother, Man)
"Tibet is a beautiful and richly endowed region of our great motherland."
- Jinato Hu
"The worst feature of a new baby is its mother's singing."
- Kin Hubbard
(Related: Mother, Baby, Singing)
"The more we refuse to buy into our inner critics - and our external ones too - the easier it will get to have confidence in our choices, and to feel comfortable with who we are - as women and as mothers."
- Arianna Huffington
(Related: Women, Choices, Confidence, Mothers, Will)
"The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless is mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly - indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection."
- Arianna Huffington
(Related: Mother, Idea, Imperfection, Uncertainty)
"I think while all mothers deal with feelings of guilt, working mothers are plagued by guilt on steroids!"
- Arianna Huffington
(Related: Feelings, Guilt, Mothers)
"The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Thoughts, Evil)
"A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Mother, Children, Sleep, Tenderness)
"Today, Arizona's sons and daughters, mothers and fathers are proudly serving their country."
- Jane D. Hull
(Related: Country, Daughters, Fathers, Mothers, Sons, Today)
"Every child growing up will look to their parents, my mother and my father. My grandmother lived with us. I picked up quite a bit of family lore and history from her, which was interesting."
- John Hume
(Related: Family, History, Mother, Father, Growing up, Parents, Will)
"Behind every successful man is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law."
- Hubert H. Humphrey
(Related: Mother, Wife, Successful, Man)
"To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother."
- Barry Humphries
(Related: Mother, Dancing, Night, Party)
"If I'd seen a grown man beating a crippled boy, of course I'd intervene. If my father died and left my mother destitute, it's your instinct to take care of her. So when I started to think about it in those terms, it started to make sense to me."
- Charlie Hunnam
(Related: Mother, Father, Care, Instinct, Man, Sense)
"I still have my bad days when I think I'm not getting everything I deserve. But those pass quickly once my Mother gets on the phone and says, 'listen, we used to eat rocks and walk 80 miles a day to school."
- Bonnie Hunt
(Related: Mother, Day, School)
"My mother says I was vaccinated with a phonograph needle. I love to talk. I just love to talk."
- Jerry Hunt
(Related: Love, Mother, Talk)
"Mothers and daughters can stay very connected during teenage years. In the middle of your life, you can become very alone. Even though you're connected deeply to other family members, lovers, husbands, friends."
- Holly Hunter
(Related: Family, Life, Daughters, Friends, Husbands, Lovers, Mothers, Teenage, Years)
"I learned denial from my mother. I just never confronted things and if anybody did, I just would go crazy."
- Tab Hunter
(Related: Mother, Denial)
"I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian."
- Michelle Hunziker
(Related: Mother, Father, Language, Luck, Parents, School)
"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
(Related: Life, Mother, Father, Fear, Drinks, Woman)
"No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life."
- Thomas Huxley
(Related: Life, Science, Mother, Delusion)
"My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: God, Mother, Father, Gods, Beginning, Communism, Earth, Heaven)
"My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15."
- Jeremy Irons
(Related: Home, Mother, Father)
"A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all."
- Washington Irving
(Related: Love, Father, Mother, Brothers, Enemies, Husbands, May, Sisters, Wives)
"I heard someone in opposition to reform last night criticize the president for saying it's their money. They said it's not their money; it's my mother's money. Well that's what's wrong with the system."
- Johnny Isakson
(Related: Money, Mother, Night, Opposition, President, Reform, Saying, Wrong)
"My mother kept asking me, 'When are you going to do a gospel album?' And I've always wanted to do a gospel album. Everybody was going on about it, so mom started hounding me more."
- Alan Jackson
(Related: Mom, Mother)
"I started hustling at 12, my mother hustled ahead of me. I was only allowed to because they knew me."
- Curtis Jackson
(Related: Mother)
"Two days ago, I was killed in LA. CNN reported that. What if my grandmother had seen that and had a heart attack? People talk about lyrical content. There is no media responsibility. Movies, the porn industry, it has to be across the board or it's ineffective."
- Curtis Jackson
(Related: Movies, People, Heart, Content, Media, Responsibility, Talk)
"When the baby dies, On every side Rose stranger's voices, hard and harsh and loud. The baby was not wrapped in any shroud. The mother made no sound. Her head was bowed That men's eyes might not see Her misery."
- Helen Hunt Jackson
(Related: Men, Mother, Baby, Eyes, Misery, Sound)
"Motherhood is priced Of God, at price no man may dare To lessen or misunderstand."
- Helen Hunt Jackson
(Related: God, Man, May, Motherhood)
"A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children."
- Holbrook Jackson
(Related: Mother, Children)
"My mother's wonderful. To me she's perfection."
- Michael Jackson
(Related: Mother, Perfection)
"When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave."
- Harriet Ann Jacobs
(Related: Time, Mother, First, Old, Talk, Years)
"For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood."
- Harriet Ann Jacobs
(Related: Childhood, Mind, Principles, Years)
"But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns."
- Harriet Ann Jacobs
(Related: Mother, Children, Day, May, New year)
"My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that."
- Etta James
(Related: Mother, Song)
"My mother always wanted me to be glamorous. When I thought about that, it really fired me up, and once I lost all those pounds, I started to feel really good about myself."
- Etta James
(Related: Mother, Thought)
"My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!"
- Etta James
(Related: Mother, Jazz, Play)
"For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you'd would wake up times and hope that the next day you'd be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home."
- LeBron James
(Related: Home, Mom, Mother, Hope, Being, Care, Day, Trying)
"I was angry about the fact that my father would beat my mother on a daily basis, that my mother would take it in turn and beat on me. I was an abused child. I was mad about all those things, very bitter and very angry."
- Rick James
(Related: Mother, Father, Fact)
"It definitely puts a strain on family life - I miss them like mad. Being a working mother I've been juggling house and career from day one. I want to hold out for telly for the second half of the year."
- Louise Jameson
(Related: Family, Life, Mother, Being, Career, Day, Want)
"On October 28th, 1887, I became the mother of a girl baby, the very image of its father, at least that is what he said, but who has the temper of its mother."
- Calamity Jane
(Related: Mother, Father, Baby, October, Temper)
"Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Mother, Father, Film)
"This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Mother, Tongue, Universe, Words)
"I was raised in a Christian home and, in fact, my mother led me to Christ as a youngster."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Home, Mother, Christian, Fact)
"When I got on the airplane in Indonesia coming to Japan, my intentions was to turn myself in to the military for the simple reason I would like to put my daughters with their mother, one thing. Another thing, I'd like to clear my conscience."
- Robert Jenkins
(Related: Mother, Conscience, Daughters, Intentions, Military, Reason)
"But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses."
- Jerome K. Jerome
(Related: Mother, Man)
"I was aware of it, but I grew up in a very a-religious family. My mother never went to church, she never had any religious training or background. It was never a part of our social interaction."
- Donald Johanson
(Related: Family, Mother, Church, Religious, Training)
"My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her."
- Guy Johnson
(Related: Poetry, Birthday, Mother)
"My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her."
- James Weldon Johnson
(Related: Mother, Woman)
"My mother was the influence in my life. She was strong; she had great faith in the ultimate triumph of justice and hard work. She believed passionately in education."
- John H. Johnson
(Related: Education, Faith, Life, Work, Mother, Hard work, Influence, Justice)
"I do get angry some time, but if I let that feeling take over it would only cloud my thinking and disable me from making the right decision when it counts the most. I just try to think about my mother, children, God, and of course my freedom."
- Lonnie Earl Johnson
(Related: God, Time, Mother, Decision, Children, Feeling, Freedom, Right, Thinking)
"This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me-and my mother would have believed it."
- Lyndon B. Johnson
(Related: Mother, Father, Parents)
"That's what my mother did. And my father was the first person she'd met who treated her kindly. She was terrified of men, and she married a very meek, kind, dear man. And she had the upper hand. She ruled the roost."
- Lynn Johnston
(Related: Men, Mother, Father, First, Man)
"My mother was a very literate person who had educated herself. She had an exceptional vocabulary."
- Lynn Johnston
(Related: Mother, Vocabulary)
"You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian."
- Lynn Johnston
(Related: Family, Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, Abuse)
"But even though all this was going on at home, if someone had tried to take me away and put me in a children's home, I couldn't have handled it. Even though my mother was very brutal, it was my home."
- Lynn Johnston
(Related: Home, Mother, Children)
"After I got this job at the syndicate, I started sending them money so they could go on trips and do the things they could never afford to do. All the while, I never knew that my mother was socking money away."
- Lynn Johnston
(Related: Money, Mother, Job)
"Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother."
- Beverly Jones
(Related: Mother, Now)
"My grandmother though, began to prepare in her own neurotic - and I think psychotic - way to face racism. So she taught us to be racist, which is something I had to undo later when I got to Michigan, you know."
- James Earl Jones
(Related: Racism)
"My grandmother had the most dramatic effect on my life because she set me in one direction, and I had to go back the other direction for my sanity, and for my ability to be a social human being."
- James Earl Jones
(Related: Life, Ability, Being, Direction, Effect, Sanity)
"It has to be real, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important, and it has to be people who are present, you know, and mothers and fathers, both are not present enough with children."
- James Earl Jones
(Related: Family, Society, People, Children, Fathers, Mothers, Present, Problems)
"My mother told me never explain, never complain. Even as a young actress, I determined I would never give personal interviews, since they made me so uncomfortable."
- Jennifer Jones
(Related: Mother)
"I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike."
- Mary Harris Jones
(Related: Men, Children, Clothes, Despair, Martyrs, Mothers, Sanity)
"I am Mother Jones. The Government can't take my life and you can't take my arm, but you can take my suitcase."
- Mary Harris Jones
(Related: Government, Life, Mother)
"That is, the wife must care for what the husband cares for if he is to remain resolute."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Wife, HusbCare)
"Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit!"
- Mother Jones
(Related: Day, Possession, Will, Workers)
"Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Fight, Hell, Living)
"My teachers treated me as a diamond in the rough, someone who needed smoothing."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Teachers)
"My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Fight, Wrong)
"Injustice boils in men's hearts as does steel in its cauldron, ready to pour forth, white hot, in the fullness of time."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Time, Men, Injustice)
"I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Hell)
"Whatever your fight, don't be ladylike."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Fight)
"The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Constitution, End)
"If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!"
- Mother Jones
(Related: Freedom, Want, Will)
"I preferred sewing to bossing little children."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Children)
"I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Career, Labor, Wrongs)
"I believe that no man who holds a leader's position should ever accept favors from either side. He is then committed to show favors. A leader must stand alone."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Leader, Favors, Man)
"I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please."
- Mother Jones
(Related: Truth, Pen, Will)
"I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!"
- Mother Jones
(Related: Country, Hell, Vote)
"When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out."
- Quincy Jones
(Related: Mother, Father, Old, Years)
"But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966."
- June Jordan
(Related: Friendship, Freedom, Mothers)
"My mother was the president of the PTA at every school I attended."
- Vernon Jordan
(Related: Mother, President, School)
"The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it."
- Chief Joseph
(Related: Mother, People, Earth, Rights)
"I was myself brought up with my brother, whose name was Matthias, for he was my own brother, by both father and mother; and I made mighty proficiency in the improvements of my learning, and appeared to have both a great memory and understanding."
- Flavius Josephus
(Related: Mother, Father, Brother, Learning, Memory, Name, Understanding)
"My parents, and especially my mother, encouraged by the director of the local school which I was attending, wanted in spite of everything to send me to a National School of Arts and Crafts so that I could later become an engineer."
- Leon Jouhaux
(Related: Mother, Parents, School)
"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not."
- James Joyce
(Related: Love, Mother, World)
"I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction."
- James Joyce
(Related: Legal, Age, Mother, Father, Fiction, Name, Will)
"The mother-daughter relationship is the most complex."
- Wynonna Judd
(Related: Mother)
"My parents kept the best aspects of the Asian culture, and they Americanized the family. My mother was a great example for me. She was a working mother with a good career."
- Andrea Jung
(Related: Family, Mother, Career, Culture, Example, Parents)
"Since I'm a mother and a wife, I have to have passion or the frustration would win out. But I love managing people. The product is second to managing the people. And marketing to consumers is so challenging because it is evolving constantly."
- Andrea Jung
(Related: Love, Mother, Wife, People, Frustration, Marketing, Passion)
"Like I said on my bio on my webpage, I was born at an early age, I was close to my mother."
- Peter Jurasik
(Related: Age, Mother)
"If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher."
- Abdul Kalam
(Related: Mother, Father, Corruption, Country, Difference, Key, Nation)
"I made it to protect the motherland."
- Mikhail Kalashnikov
"I grew up in a family where our mother made our clothing. We didn't have a lot of money, so we learned how to scrimp, and we learned how to invent and to create. And those are learned skills."
- Marcy Kaptur
(Related: Family, Money, Mother)
"My mother sent me to psychiatrists since the age of four because she didn't think little boys should be sad. When my brother was born, I stared out the window for days. Can you imagine that?"
- Andy Kaufman
(Related: Age, Mother, Brother, Boys)
"My mother used to go out on her own, and I used to have to keep a look out for my stepfather coming home."
- Christine Keeler
(Related: Home, Mother)
"You didn't hear the angels singing. It was brought down to Mother Earth, which is where it should be. And that led me to a lot of other reading."
- Harvey Keitel
(Related: Mother, Angels, Earth, Reading, Singing)
"We always had chocolates and my mother was careful to make sure they were unwrapped in advance so the paper wouldn't rustle in the middle of a performance."
- Penelope Keith
(Related: Mother, Performance)
"My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered."
- Gene Kelly
(Related: Mother, Idea, Dancing, Job, Open, School)
"As a former teacher and a mother and grandmother, I know firsthand the importance of a quality education."
- Sue Kelly
(Related: Education, Quality, Mother, Importance)
"I hope to start enjoying flirting again when I'm 70, like my mother did."
- Felicity Kendal
(Related: Mother, Hope, Flirting)
"My brother arrived some months after my father left. Um, and he ah, was thus eight years younger than me and it was um, you know, it was such a time that my mother probably had people wondering was it his."
- Thomas Keneally
(Related: Time, Mother, Father, Brother, People, Months, Years)
"Thomas was my true name but everyone knew me as Mick, except my mother, who knew me as definitely Michael."
- Thomas Keneally
(Related: Mother, Name)
"One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer."
- Caroline Kennedy
(Related: Love, Mother, Brother, Energy, Gifts, Language, Libraries, Literature, Old, Open)
"When my mother died, I had to go on air that night and do jokes."
- Graham Kennedy
(Related: Mother, Jokes, Night)
"An Editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an Editor."
- Jackie Kennedy
(Related: Love, Mother, Encouragement)
"I'll be a wife and mother first, then First Lady."
- Jackie Kennedy
(Related: Mother, Wife, First, Lady)
"Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to become politicians in the process."
- John F. Kennedy
(Related: Mothers, Politicians, President, Sons, Want)
"My mother is still battling alcoholism."
- Patrick J. Kennedy
(Related: Mother)
"When the grandmothers of today hear the word "Chippendales," they don't necessary think of chairs."
- Jean Kerr
(Related: Today, Word)
"But after a few minutes of convincing myself that I really wanted to go - telling myself that I love skating and that my coach is there waiting for me - I would get up and go. And my mother would always get up and eat breakfast with me!"
- Nancy Kerrigan
(Related: Love, Mother, Coach, Waiting)
"My mother is an actress, and she used to drag me from theater to theater and reading to reading."
- Alicia Keys
(Related: Mother, Reading, Theater)
"I'm a grandmother with dogs and nice friends here in the Rocky mountains. Ever see the movie A River Runs Through It? That's where I live. It's beautiful, no two ways about it."
- Margot Kidder
(Related: Dogs, Friends, Mountains)
"I'm a woman, a mother, a daughter, a sister. I'm a real person operating in the world. For me to discuss the most private thing feels wrong. It feels like I'm betraying myself and my children."
- Nicole Kidman
(Related: Mother, Sister, Daughter, Children, Woman, World, Wrong)
"My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass"; "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys"."
- Harmon Killebrew
(Related: Dad, Mother, Father, Brother, Play)
"Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws."
- Barbara Kingsolver
(Related: Strength, Laws, Motherhood)
"If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!"
- Rudyard Kipling
(Related: Love, Mother)
"If I were dammed of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, mother o' mine o mother o' mine."
- Rudyard Kipling
(Related: Mother, Soul, Body)
"God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers."
- Rudyard Kipling
(Related: God, Mothers)
"An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy."
- Rudyard Kipling
(Related: Mother, Worth)
"She was a genius, my mother."
- Sally Kirkland
(Related: Mother, Genius)
"The public has become my fairy godmother."
- Eartha Kitt
(Related: Public)
"I was given away. If your mother gives you away, you think everybody who comes into your life is going to give you away."
- Eartha Kitt
(Related: Life, Mother)
"Shortly after I was born he emigrated to Durban, where members of my mother's family had settled at the turn of the century, and the rest of the family followed soon thereafter."
- Aaron Klug
(Related: Family, Mother, Rest)
"The Brady Bunch is a live action modern fairytale of family. In this context it's less odd that it's lasted for over thirty years; and why it may last in some respects as long as Mother Goose!"
- Christopher Knight
(Related: Family, Mother, Action, May, Years)
"There are things that you cannot talk to your mother and father about, there are things that you cannot talk to your children about."
- Shirley Knight
(Related: Mother, Father, Children, Talk)
"When you're a woman in your 40s, it's not the best time to do films, because there really aren't that many roles. Then you reach 50 and there are more roles again. Mother parts."
- Shirley Knight
(Related: Time, Mother, Woman)
"My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education."
- John Knowles
(Related: Business, Dad, Education, Mother, Father, England)
"To my father, business was the highest calling, but to my mother, medicine was the top profession."
- William Standish Knowles
(Related: Business, Mother, Father, Medicine, Profession)
"I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Family, Mother, Being, Literary, Literature)
"Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden."
- Karl Kraus
(Related: Mother, Thought, Language)
"My mother gave lots of good advice and had a lot to say. As you get older, you realize everything she said was true."
- Lenny Kravitz
(Related: Mother, Advice)
"Terry's mother worked in the film industry for many years. She always wanted him to marry an actress."
- Marta Kristen
(Related: Mother, Film, Years)
"I was born in Norway, and when I was little I went to live in Detroit, Michigan. My father was a professor of philosophy at Wayne University, and my mother was also a teacher."
- Marta Kristen
(Related: Mother, Father, Philosophy, University)
"It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder."
- Joseph Wood Krutch
(Related: Mother, Knowledge, Ignorance, Wonder)
"I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers."
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
(Related: Experience, Life, Time, Mother, Goal, Help)
"I actually made an effort to reject acting, to shove it out of my body, because I didn't want my kids to have an actress as a mother-to have, like, a silly person."
- Lisa Kudrow
(Related: Mother, Acting, Body, Effort, Kids, Silly, Want)
"I grew with it, and I used to go to see the monks, who had no possessions, even more extreme than my mother."
- Satish Kumar
(Related: Mother, Extreme, Possessions)
"I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society."
- Charles Kuralt
(Related: Life, Society, Mother, Father, Eyes, Kids)
"My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father."
- Charles Kuralt
(Related: Family, Mother, Father, Treatment)
"Mother Nature made me the way I am, and I should be happy."
- Karolina Kurkova
(Related: Nature, Mother)
"My neighborhood was rough, but I live a great life now. I don't fight that much now. I don't look for it anyway, but if someone hits your mother, whether you're a star, an accountant, or an astronaut or anything... I mean it's your mother, so I lost my mind."
- Shia LaBeouf
(Related: Life, Mother, Fight, Mind, Now)
"I remember all too well the premiere of Ecstasy when I watched my bare bottom bounce across the screen and my mother and father sat there in shock."
- Hedy Lamarr
(Related: Mother, Father, Ecstasy)
"My mother always called me an ugly weed, so I never was aware of anything until I was older. Plain girls should have someone telling them they are beautiful. Sometimes this works miracles."
- Hedy Lamarr
(Related: Mother, Girls, Miracles, Ugly)
"My mother, whose family was heavily rabbinic, said she wanted me to continue the family tradition in the rabbinate. My father said he wanted me to be a scholar of the Talmud, but he wanted me to make my living in science."
- Norman Lamm
(Related: Family, Science, Mother, Father, Living, Tradition)
"A circus is like a mother in whom one can confide and who rewards and punishes."
- Burt Lancaster
(Related: Mother)
"Mother beat the hell out of us. She'd have wild outbursts."
- Burt Lancaster
(Related: Mother, Hell)
"The president took the advice of my East Texas grandmother: If you can skin a cat without getting the room all bloody, why not do it that way?"
- Richard Land
(Related: Advice, President, Skin)
"The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children."
- Jessica Lange
(Related: Mother, Children, Motherhood, State, Universe)
"I love being a mother. I loved being a daughter, a sister, a wife. I love being a woman with men. I love having given birth."
- Jessica Lange
(Related: Love, Men, Mother, Sister, Wife, Daughter, Being, Woman)
"For me, nothing has ever taken precedence over being a mother and having a family and a home."
- Jessica Lange
(Related: Family, Home, Mother, Being, Nothing)
"I am a grandmother now, and that means age is creeping on, creeping on."
- Lillie Langtry
(Related: Age, Now)
"I started in London, as a kid. My mother knew I had sort of an inbred talent. She was an actress, so I inherited it from her. But I think I got a lot of it from my grandfather, who was a great politician."
- Angela Lansbury
(Related: Mother, Talent, London)
"Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking."
- John Lasseter
(Related: Mother, Animation, Baby, Computer, Film, Novelty)
"My mother, who was professional schoolteacher, was particularly concerned about our formal education and even went so far as to start a private school together with some other parents so that our intellectual needs would be met."
- Robert B. Laughlin
(Related: Education, Mother, Needs, Parents, School)
"My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing."
- Robert B. Laughlin
(Related: Mother, Effect, Now, Play, Pleasure)
"It's the kind of clothes that mothers and daughters can wear, in terms of concept... It's not about age. It's about taste, and it's about lifestyle. I believe women of all ages can wear anything."
- Ralph Lauren
(Related: Women, Age, Clothes, Daughters, Mothers, Taste)
"I didn't want to do anything my mother wanted me to do so surely I wasn't going to sing for her."
- Linda Lavin
(Related: Mother, Want)
"My mother gave me singing lessons; that was totally painful, because I couldn't do what she wanted to hear. She used to say: there's more there, there's more voice but I just didn't want to give it to her."
- Linda Lavin
(Related: Mother, Singing, Voice, Want)
"They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates."
- David Herbert Lawrence
(Related: Mothers)
"The only thing that seems eternal and natural in motherhood is ambivalence."
- Jane Lazarre
(Related: Motherhood)
"She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to."
- Gypsy Rose Lee
(Related: Mother)
"This is my present, you know. My present from Mother."
- Gypsy Rose Lee
(Related: Mother, Present)
"Apparently I'm the most naked that anyone's been on TNT. My poor mother. I'm ready to run away."
- Sheryl Lee
(Related: Mother, Poor)
"As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Mother, Invention)
"My father had left behind an old piano. My sister was already going to school, my mother was out working, and I stayed at home alone with my adorable grandmother who understood nothing I said. It was so boring that I stayed at the piano all day long, and that saved my life."
- Michel Legrand
(Related: Home, Life, Mother, Father, Sister, Day, Nothing, Old, School)
"The pictures of my family were designed to be on a family wall, they were supposed to be together. It was supposed to copy my mother's wall in her house."
- Annie Leibovitz
(Related: Family, Mother)
"You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can't see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that's me."
- Vivien Leigh
(Related: Happiness, Mother)
"I've been a godmother loads of times, but being a grandmother is better than anything."
- Vivien Leigh
(Related: Being)
"You're not famous until my mother has heard of you."
- Jay Leno
(Related: Mother, Famous)
"Don't forget Mother's Day. Or as they call it in Beverly Hills, Dad's Third Wife Day."
- Jay Leno
(Related: Dad, Mother, Wife, Day, Forget)
"My mother was passionate. She was stubborn, the dominant one in the family. She dominated my father."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: Family, Mother, Father)
"First of all, returning from motherhood, I was looking for something lighter, and I wasn't as much attracted to Kate as I was to the relationship between the two people."
- Tea Leoni
(Related: People, First, Motherhood)
"And I thought, you know, I have to say that maybe the whacked out mother is my new favorite role, but I don't want to just do it and become Nurse Ratchett."
- Tea Leoni
(Related: Mother, Thought, Favorite, Want)
"We found that when people put this issue on the table, it turns out that men acknowledge the issue, and employers and employees can work out solutions just as working mothers do."
- James Levine
(Related: Men, Work, People, Employees, Mothers)
"Working mothers do an hour more per day than working fathers do and working mothers do on average an hour more per day with the kids than working fathers do."
- James Levine
(Related: Day, Fathers, Kids, Mothers)
"So, the total number of hours spent on the stuff you have to do to take care of a family, working and caring for stuff at home, the total number of hours is actually about the same for mothers and fathers."
- James Levine
(Related: Family, Home, Care, Caring, Fathers, Mothers)
"I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet."
- Philip Levine
(Related: Mother)
"My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs."
- Philip Levine
(Related: Poetry, Mother, Ambition, Songs)
"What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center."
- Al Lewis
(Related: Life, Mother, Woman)
"Understood what the struggle was about. My mother. Couldn't read or write, but she had more sense than many a graduate from Harvard."
- Al Lewis
(Related: Mother, Sense, Struggle)
"In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation."
- Michael Lewis
(Related: Love, Achievement, Accomplishment, Children, Mothers, Respect)
"My grandmother was a Jewish juggler: she used to worry about six things at once."
- Richard Lewis
(Related: Worry)
"My mother always said don't marry for money, divorce for money."
- Wendy Liebman
(Related: Money, Mother, Divorce)
"Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in."
- Robert Jay Lifton
(Related: Mother, Father, Judaism, Parents, Pride)
"Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully."
- Gyorgy Ligeti
(Related: Mother)
"Just as a mother finds pleasure in taking her little child on her lap, there to feed and caress him, in like manner our loving God shows His fondness for His beloved souls who have given themselves entirely to Him and have placed all their hope in His goodness."
- Alphonsus Liguori
(Related: God, Mother, Hope, Goodness, Pleasure)
"I was born because my mother needed a fourth for meals."
- Beatrice Lillie
(Related: Mother)
"In the seventeenth year of my age my mother died."
- William Lilly
(Related: Age, Mother)
"All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."
- Abraham Lincoln
(Related: Mother, Hope)
"I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."
- Abraham Lincoln
(Related: Life, Mother)
"My Cape women are generally true to type - big hearted, motherly women who love the sea. My other characters, with the exception of the Portuguese, who I occasionally mention as Cape dwellers, are obviously drawn from the city types one sees in everyday life."
- Joseph C. Lincoln
(Related: Life, Love, Women, Sea)
"My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship."
- Joseph C. Lincoln
(Related: Mother, Father, People, Sea, Years)
"By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
(Related: Time, Class, Mothers, Workers)
"I demand for the unmarried mother, as a sacred channel of life, the same reverence and respect as for the married mother; for Maternity is a cosmic thing and once it has come to pass, our conversation must not be permitted to blaspheme it."
- Ben Lindsey
(Related: Life, Mother, Conversation, Respect)
"I stand fearlessly for small dogs, the American Flag, motherhood and the Bible. That's why people love me."
- Art Linkletter
(Related: Love, People, Bible, American, Dogs, Motherhood)
"The relationship I have to my fatherland is like that of mothers with crippled children: they love them all the more, the more crippled they are. Germany is the background of all my plans, the return to Germany."
- Friedrich List
(Related: Love, Germany, Mothers)
"As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation."
- Franz Liszt
(Related: Mother, Children, Language)
"Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me."
- John Lithgow
(Related: Mother, Shakespeare)
"I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Family, Home, Country, First, Years)
"Now I have children of my own. They ask their mother what will I be. Will I be handsome, will I be rich?"
- Jay Livingston
(Related: Mother, Children, Now, Will)
"I have many memories of waking up to eat breakfast that my mother carefully prepared for us and her saying, what do y'all want for lunch, and as we're eating lunch, what do y'all want for dinner? It's always about the next meal."
- Lisa Loeb
(Related: Mother, Eating, Memories, Saying, Waking, Want)
"I had to get in touch with the source, I had to go back into my abandonment issues with my mother, I had to go into issues with my father I hadn't even looked at before."
- Kenny Loggins
(Related: Mother, Father)
"My little sister Aliana's opinions are the most important to me. She says, 'I want to look like you, you're so pretty!' But she is very beautiful and so she is trouble in the making! She wants to do what I do. I'm like her second mother and I am very protective of her."
- Lindsay Lohan
(Related: Mother, Sister, Opinions, Trouble, Want)
"For Astrid, no matter what challenges they go through, they are going to face each other. It's hard for a daughter to accept that her mother is that selfish and that terrible."
- Alison Lohman
(Related: Mother, Daughter)
"The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class."
- Jack London
(Related: God, Mother, Class)
"I didn't have parents, so I lived in people's homes... And because I grew up with no parental role models, I learned to become my own friend, eventually my own father and my own mother."
- John Lone
(Related: Mother, Father, People, Friend, Parents)
"I never grew up with a mother's hand - that's why I will forever be insecure, I think, in that primal way."
- John Lone
(Related: Mother, Will)
"For support, I fall back on my heart. Has a man any fault a woman cannot weave with and try to change into something better, if the god her man prays to is a mother holding a baby?"
- Haniel Long
(Related: Change, Mother, God, Heart, Baby, Fault, Man, Support, Woman)
"I said 'Brian, no one is going to respect me as a mother after this.' He said, 'oh no, yes they will, this is a movie, don't worry about it.' But they're not."
- Nia Long
(Related: Mother, Respect, Will, Worry)
"This is the man my mother lived for. My career means something now because I've worked with Robert Redford."
- Jennifer Lopez
(Related: Mother, Career, Man, Now)
"There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else."
- Audre Lorde
(Related: Mother, Key, Want, Woman)
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child."
- Sophia Loren
(Related: Mother, Thoughts)
"I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went there together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for so many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is associated in my memory with my mother."
- Pierre Loti
(Related: Family, Mother, Church, Memory, Reason, Years)
"I'm ultimately a widow and a single mother, who's not even getting to be a mother right now. I am so alone, it's freaky."
- Courtney Love
(Related: Mother, Now, Right)
"My parents were both from extremely different backgrounds. My father's Italian, my mother was of Swedish descent. They're both first-generation Americans."
- Susan Lucci
(Related: Mother, Father, Americans, First, Parents)
"You know, that's the only good thing about divorce; you get to sleep with your mother."
- Clare Boothe Luce
(Related: Mother, Divorce, Sleep)
"Instead of joyfully looking forward to my birth, my mother began systematically preparing for her own death. She was fatalistic."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Death, Mother)
"My mother was a phoenix who always expected to rise from the ashes of her latest disaster. She loved being Judy Garland."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Being, Disaster)
"My mother should have been Jewish. She could have taught a class on how to induce guilt."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Class, Guilt)
"Liza is in the tabloids almost as much as our mother was. She has struggled with her own ghosts and shadows."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Shadows)
"Even at al my mother's concerts, I had never seen people go crazy the way they did with the Beatles."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, People)
"My mother was electric onstage, and I vividly recall the extraordinary power she had over her audiences."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Power, Mother, Audiences)
"My mother wasn't rational those last years; if she had been, she would have been horrified by her own behavior."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Behavior, Years)
"My mother's suicide attempts were a way to release anxiety and get attention. Some of the attempts were drug reactions she didn't even remember later on."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Anxiety, Attention, Suicide)
"When I look back at The Judy Garland Show, I have such mixed feelings. It broke my mother's heart when they canceled it."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Feelings, Heart)
"Vincente understood all too well what was happening to Liza; he had gone through it 40 years earlier with my mother."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Years)
"The sicker mother got, the stranger the people surrounding her became. I called them The Garland Freaks."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, People)
"The one thing I never questioned about my mother was whether she loved me."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother)
"One of the oddities about being Judy Garland's daughter was that everyone treated my mother with such awe that they would never have asked me the normal questions kids get about their moms."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Daughter, Being, Kids, Questions)
"The eyebrow pencil and false eyelashes were essential; my mother didn't feel dressed without them."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother)
"People come up to me as I leave the stage after a performance and tell me tey saw my mother onstage with me every time I sing. I keep a sense of humor about it."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Humor, Time, Mother, People, Performance, Sense)
"When my mother signed at MGM, that was the only kind of contract you could sign. There was no such thing as an independent agent."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother)
"My mother's life had been destroyed by the Garland legend."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Life, Mother)
"The most memorable night of The Judy Garland Show for me was the night my mother pulled me out of the audience and sang to me onstage."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Night)
"I think it's time to do clean-up for a generation. I believe this is one of the movies that hits home for all colors and all races. Everybody I talk to, black or white, suburban, rich or poor, can relate to rejection, can relate to not having a father or a mother."
- Derek Luke
(Related: Home, Movies, Time, Mother, Father, Colors, Poor, Rejection, Talk)
"Though I was a mother at 21, being a grandmother makes the whole thing absolutely normal and gorgeous. The relief, the joy of being a grandmother is wonderful."
- Joanna Lumley
(Related: Mother, Being, Joy)
"In their 30s women really start to live... they're not children anymore, and they're not just mothers."
- Kelly Lynch
(Related: Women, Children, Mothers)
"I've been overwhelmed; I was a single mother for a time."
- Kelly Lynch
(Related: Time, Mother)
"Mothers don't want to pinch me or put me in their purse."
- Paul Lynde
(Related: Mothers, Want)
"The doctor's name was Sylvia. I told her she'd have a problem with me because Sylvia was my mother's name."
- Paul Lynde
(Related: Mother, Name)
"An uncle gave me a side drum and my mother decided I should have lessons."
- Humphrey Lyttelton
(Related: Mother)
"My mother insisted that I have a normal upbringing."
- James MacArthur
(Related: Mother)
"I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother."
- Mary MacLane
(Related: Mother, Wife)
"No man succeeds without a good woman behind him. Wife or mother, if it is both, he is twice blessed indeed."
- Harold MacMillan
(Related: Mother, Wife, Man, Woman)
"I grew up in kind of the last generation of Canadians who thought things that were happening in Britain were more important, almost, than what was happening in Canada. And my mother was fervently of that opinion."
- Robert MacNeil
(Related: Mother, Thought, Canada, Opinion)
"I owed it to my father that I was elected to Parliament in the first place, but I owed it to my mother that I stuck it out once I got there."
- Agnes Macphail
(Related: Mother, Father, First, Parliament)
"I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin."
- Virginia Madsen
(Related: Mother, Father, American, Irish, Skin)
"When I was a child I had a best friend who lived across the road from me. When her mother died unexpectedly it was like losing a member of my own family. I think I am still affected by the memory of that loss."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Family, Mother, Friend, Losing, Loss, Memory, Road)
"Girls are the future mothers of our society, and it is important that we focus on their well-being."
- Miriam Makeba
(Related: Society, Focus, Future, Girls, Mothers)
"They talked about me as if I were Mother Teresa, and that every time I get a paycheck I go and send it to poor people and that we spend every free moment helping out people less fortunate. That was an enormous exaggeration."
- Wendie Malick
(Related: Time, Mother, People, Exaggeration, Poor)
"Even a secret agent can't lie to a Jewish mother."
- Peter Malkin
(Related: Mother, Lie)
"I started out as a very young girl in Hollywood doing westerns portraying a mother with a couple of kids."
- Dorothy Malone
(Related: Mother, Hollywood, Kids)
"I never turned down a mother role."
- Dorothy Malone
(Related: Mother)
"One girl who stands out was this Miami stripper. She still lives with her mother and father, and they know she strips. They call her by her stripper name, Freaky Red."
- Method Man
(Related: Mother, Father, Name)
"In my fantasies, I always wanted to play the ingenue, but in reality, in my bones, I am so used to playing the grandmother that I don't feel safe or even sure that I can do it."
- Camryn Manheim
(Related: Play, Reality)
"My father's father came from Russia; my mother came from Romania."
- Herbie Mann
(Related: Mother, Father, Russia)
"How old am I? I'm as old as my mother told me. How's that?"
- Charles Manson
(Related: Mother, Old)
"I punched my mother out once."
- Charles Manson
(Related: Mother)
"I loved my mother, she's a good girl."
- Charles Manson
(Related: Mother)
"For every Mother Teresa, there's a Jeffrey Dahmer."
- Joe Mantegna
(Related: Mother)
"My mother used to wheel me about the campus when we lived in that neighborhood and, as she recounted years later, she would tell me that I would go to McGill."
- Rudolph A. Marcus
(Related: Mother, Years)
"So often we try to alter circumstances to suit ourselves, instead of letting them alter us, which is what they are meant to do."
- Mother Maribel
(Related: Circumstances)
"Our Lord did not try to alter circumstances. He submitted to them. They shaped his life and eventually brought him to Calvary. I believe we miss opportunities and lovely secrets our Lord is waiting to teach us by not taking what comes."
- Mother Maribel
(Related: Life, Circumstances, Secrets, Waiting)
"Our real work is prayer. What good is the cold iron of our frantic little efforts unless first we heat it in the furnace of our prayer? Only heat will diffuse heat."
- Mother Maribel
(Related: Work, First, Prayer, Will)
"I have a different mentality when it comes to catering to a man, I just won't allow it. Don't get me wrong, I'll do for you but I'm not taking care of no man and catering to him for life; he better be bringing something to the table. I learned that from my mother and my grandmother."
- Teena Marie
(Related: Life, Mother, Care, Man, Wrong)
"Beware the cute, hot guy who kind of reminds you of the parent you don't get along with: your cold, distant father who left when you were a kid or your hot-tempered mother whom you could never please."
- Merrill Markoe
(Related: Mother, Father, Cute)
"Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits."
- Christopher Marlowe
(Related: Mother)
"I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time."
- Wynton Marsalis
(Related: Time, Men, Mother, Father, Books, Talk, Talking)
"Working mothers are just as likely to want to conform to a standard of perfection and just as likely to suffer from their failure to meet it as their stay-at-home counterparts."
- Melinda M. Marshall
(Related: Failure, Mothers, Perfection, Want)
"Motherhood in all its guises and permutations is more art than science."
- Melinda M. Marshall
(Related: Art, Science, Motherhood)
"A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for."
- Thurgood Marshall
(Related: Mother, Goal, Baby, Challenge, Rights, State, states, United, Worth)
"My mother loved children - she would have given anything if I had been one."
- Groucho Marx
(Related: Mother, Children)
"Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil's spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive."
- Eric Massa
(Related: Mother, Son, Children, Devil, End, Vote)
"With whom do you argue? With a woman, of course. Not with a friend, because he accepted all your defects the moment he found you. Besides, woman is mother-have we forgotten?"
- Marcello Mastroianni
(Related: Mother, Friend, Woman)
"I had a very special family life. My mother and father made sure when we were home, we were part of the family, not a TV star. And the other thing: my father was fully employed while I was doing the series."
- Jerry Mathers
(Related: Family, Home, Life, Mother, Father)
"My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done."
- Harry Mathews
(Related: Mother)
"I was six months old at the time that I was taken, with my mother and father, from Sacramento, California, and placed in internment camps in the United States."
- Robert Matsui
(Related: Time, Mother, Father, Months, Old, states, United)
"I mean, if somebody said to me, junior year of college, you can go anywhere, your old man's paying for it, I'd have been gone in a flash. But I had to work. Every summer my mother would say, 'Get that job and hold on to it until August 30.'"
- Chris Matthews
(Related: Work, Mother, College, Job, Man, Old, Summer)
"We should be the natural home for young mothers. But we're not. Because too often we sound like people who think the only good mother is a married mother."
- Francis Maude
(Related: Home, Mother, People, Mothers, Sound)
"Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Mother)
"Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante."
- Debi Mazar
(Related: Mother, Friend, Management, Being)
"God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother."
- Giuseppe Mazzini
(Related: Love, Mother, God, Country, Humanity)
"That surely must be a concern to anyone who decides this drug must be given to stop transmissions, again from mother to child, which is extremely costly and must be taken into account."
- Thabo Mbeki
(Related: Mother, Concern)
"When you're interviewing someone, even your mother - you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what's the best way to get the information from that person."
- James McBride
(Related: Mother, Information, Space)
"I know many Catholics love God with all their heart. I have genuine respect for anyone who truly has given their life to Christ. We read about Mother Teresa and what a wonderful example she was."
- Bill McCartney
(Related: Life, Love, Mother, God, Heart, Christ, Example, Respect)
"My mother was killed in a plane crash, so I hate travelling in planes. Death is so unexpected. I would actually rather stay at home and not go anywhere."
- Linda McCartney
(Related: Death, Home, Mother, Hate)
"So that what you tend to see is someone like a Rush Limbaugh, he's the classic case because he's the most successful, he didn't sort of like come out of his mother's womb with the highest ratings in the country."
- Robert McChesney
(Related: Mother, Successful, Country)
"Actually, my mother and Alfie came for three weeks' Christmas vacation and stayed for 21 years. I guess my mother never went back because she was lonely."
- Frank McCourt
(Related: Mother, Christmas, Lonely, Vacation, Years)
"He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back... I went to his funeral in Belfast."
- Frank McCourt
(Related: Work, Mother, states)
"I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities."
- David McCullough
(Related: Education, Mother, Father, Stars)
"When I was little, my mother taught me how to use a fork and knife. The trouble is that Mother forget to teach me how to stop using them!"
- Hattie McDaniel
(Related: Mother, Forget, Trouble)
"I haven't wanted to play a mother for a long time because I am one."
- Frances McDormand
(Related: Time, Mother, Play)
"Terri and her mother arrived. She was obviously a dedicated stage mother because she was loaded down with camera equipment, looking like a Japanese tourist."
- Audrey Meadows
(Related: Mother)
"If Terri was upset about how silly she would look, her mother was completely undone. Seems she wanted Terri in her full natural bloom, not with any blooming flower."
- Audrey Meadows
(Related: Mother, Silly)
"I would write plays for my grandmother, who was stone deaf, my mother and the dog, that was our audience."
- Jayne Meadows
(Related: Mother)
"My mother was the dearest, sweetest angel. She didn't talk; she sang. She was a tower of strength."
- Jayne Meadows
(Related: Mother, Strength, Talk)
"My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teacher's family."
- Simon van der Meer
(Related: Family, Mother, Father)
"My mother raised three children on her own and my dad was a doctor working 16 hours a day."
- Christopher Meloni
(Related: Dad, Mother, Children, Day)
"I had no expectations about fatherhood, really, but it's definitely a journey I'm glad to be taking. Number one, it's a great learning experience. When my mother told me it's a 24/7 job, she wasn't kidding."
- Christopher Meloni
(Related: Experience, Mother, Expectations, Job, Journey, Learning)
"Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends."
- H. L. Mencken
(Related: Mother, Conscience, Visit)
"I was always singing and dancing for my mother when I wasn't glued to the television watching I Love Lucy or the Carol Burnett Show."
- Debra Messing
(Related: Love, Mother, Dancing, Singing, Television)
"I believe honor thy mother and father is not just a good commandment to live by, it is good public policy to govern by. That is why I feel so strongly about Medicare."
- Barbara Mikulski
(Related: Mother, Father, Policy, Honor, Public, Public policy)
"A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world."
- Alice Duer Miller
(Related: Mother, Circumstance, Fact, Feeling, World)
"My father is black and my mother is white. Therefore, I could answer to either, which kind of makes me a racial Lone Ranger, caught between two communities."
- Wentworth Miller
(Related: Mother, Father)
"Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most."
- Kate Millett
(Related: Life, Mother)
"I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up."
- Dan Millman
(Related: Technology, Mother, Earth, Internet, Living, Religious, Zeal)
"It took one human error to take my leg and one human error to take my mother's."
- Heather Mills
(Related: Mother, Error)
"If we had a hard time, my mother would sit me down and we would talk about it, and she kept talking and kept processing until we started to laugh about it."
- Liza Minelli
(Related: Time, Mother, Talk, Talking)
"My mother was an artist and highly strung, whereas my father was much calmer."
- Liza Minelli
(Related: Mother, Father, Artist)
"I've said it before, but it's absolutely true: My mother gave me my drive, but my father gave me my dreams. Thanks to him, I could see a future."
- Liza Minelli
(Related: Dreams, Mother, Father, Future)
"He was doing - Ray was designing the clothes for my mom's show from California. And one of the first appearances I ever made on television was on my mother's show and Ray and Bob did the clothes for that. It has been a long time."
- Liza Minnelli
(Related: Time, Mom, Mother, Clothes, First, Television)
"My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area."
- George J. Mitchell
(Related: Mother, Father, Son, Boston, Ireland, Parents, states, United)
"So my father grew up in an orphanage in Boston. He was then adopted by an elderly childless couple from Maine, who gave him the name of Mitchell. He moved to Maine, and there he met my mother and was married."
- George J. Mitchell
(Related: Mother, Father, Boston, Elderly, Name)
"My mother was an immigrant from Lebanon to the United States. She came when she was 18 years old in 1920."
- George J. Mitchell
(Related: Mother, Old, states, United, Years)
"Please call your second witness, and then call your mother, she worries."
- Colin Mochrie
(Related: Mother)
"I always knew that food and wine were vital, with my mother being Italian and a good cook."
- Robert Mondavi
(Related: Food, Mother, Being, Wine)
"I always knew the importance of it, since I was three or four years old my mother used to feed me wine and water. I grew up with wine as liquid food."
- Robert Mondavi
(Related: Food, Mother, Importance, Old, Water, Wine, Years)
"My mother served me wine and water from the time I was 3 years old."
- Robert Mondavi
(Related: Time, Mother, Old, Water, Wine, Years)
"My mother and father, Joe and Theresa Montana brought me along and taught me to never quit, and to strive to be the best."
- Joe Montana
(Related: Mother, Father, Montana)
"Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Mother, Mind, Now)
"Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Women, Mother, Open)
"You know, I don't play the race card a lot. I'm half-black, half-white, and I'm proud of - my skin is brown. The world sees me as a black man, but my mother didn't raise me as a black man. She didn't raise me as a white guy."
- Shemar Moore
(Related: Mother, Man, Play, Race, Skin, World)
"But I got drafted out of high school, and my mother wasn't having it. She was like, you're not about to think that you can just play ball, because if you get hurt, you're going to be out of luck."
- Shemar Moore
(Related: Mother, Hurt, Luck, Play, School)
"What is amazing for a woman of my age is that I change as the world is changing-and changing very, very fast. I don't think my mother had that opportunity to change."
- Jeanne Moreau
(Related: Age, Change, Mother, Opportunity, Woman, World)
"Sexism is not the fault of women - kill your fathers, not your mothers."
- Robin Morgan
(Related: Women, Fathers, Fault, Mothers, Sexism)
"The first principle of child-rearing is to choose a good mother."
- Christian Morgenstern
(Related: Mother, First)
"Rosa Parks was the queen mother of a movement whose single act of heroism sparked the movement for freedom, justice and equality. Her greatest contribution is that she told us a regular person can make a difference."
- Marc Morial
(Related: Equality, Mother, Act, Difference, Freedom, Heroism, Justice, Queen)
"No matter how old we become, we can still call them 'Holy Mother' and 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them."
- Desmond Morris
(Related: Trust, Mother, Old)
"I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about."
- Toni Morrison
(Related: Money, Morality, Mothers, Poor, Question)
"My father was also a principal of a school and mother was a curriculum advisor. Both were educators."
- Edwin Moses
(Related: Mother, Father, Curriculum, School)
"Personally I'm very happy to be behind the scenes. I like collaboration, I like working with directors."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: Collaboration)
"I don't cook - I can cook - but I'm not very good. I like being asked over for dinner, because she can't cook either. We would starve if it weren't for modern technology. I know how to work a microwave, but love home cooked meals."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: Home, Love, Work, Technology, Being)
"To me I think artists in general make a statement - and for the rest of their lives - every album, every book - are variations on a theme."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: Artists, Rest)
"Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: Music, Film, London, Now, Right, Writing)
"We've turned down multi million dollar films, simply because we liked the film better. We have the luxury to do so - we have projects that make the money, and others that we do for love."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: Love, Money, Film, Luxury, Projects)
"I was lucky enough to get to perform on stage in front of 20 million people on TV, and 150 thousand in concerts. For 15 minutes I got to be a rock star, the 15 minutes is great! It turns into Spinal Tap after 20 minutes."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: People)
"As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: Style, Surrealism)
"I went to Kent State basically to avoid going to Vietnam, I had no idea what I was doing in the world. I was lost, and trying not to get into a fight every day."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: Idea, Day, Fight, State, Trying, Vietnam, World)
"My major was Fine Arts and Education thinking I would become an Art Teacher. I couldn't visualize myself as an art teacher, thinking how it wouldn't work."
- Mark Mothersbaugh
(Related: Art, Education, Work, Thinking)
"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: Art, Life, Poor)
"Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: People, Man)
"If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two blocks-but never three."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: Time, Inspiration, Walking)
"It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: Art, Deep, Examination, May, Necessity, Self)
"It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: Act)
"Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: Art, Painting, Tradition)
"Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: Beauty, Song, Will)
"Wherever art appears, life disappears."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: Art, Life)
"My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves."
- Constance Baker Motley
(Related: Parents)
"My mother said, Don't worry abot what people think now. Think about whether your children and grandchildren will think you've done well."
- Lord Mountbatten
(Related: Mother, People, Children, Now, Will, Worry)
"Would not the child's heart break in despair when the first cold storm of the world sweeps over it, if the warm sunlight of love from the eyes of mother and father did not shine upon him like the soft reflection of divine light and love?"
- Max Muller
(Related: Love, Mother, Father, Heart, Despair, Eyes, First, Light, Reflection, World)
"My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas."
- Kary Mullis
(Related: Mother, Brothers, Christmas)
"In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Mother, Childhood, Hell, Punishment)
"What I do say is, yes, children may be resilient and they have been able to deal with all sorts of difficulties they have faced, but the bottom line is this: I believe very strongly children need a mother and a father in the home."
- Timothy Murphy
(Related: Home, Mother, Father, Children, Difficulties, May)
"I hope the film will help mothers and fathers to be aware that 15 is a very vulnerable age."
- Ellen Muth
(Related: Age, Hope, Fathers, Film, Help, Mothers, Will)
"I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales."
- Mike Myers
(Related: Mother, Act, Memories)
"As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are."
- V. S. Naipaul
(Related: Children, Nothing, World)
"Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways, it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say, but in the lives they lead."
- Augustus Y. Napier
(Related: Men, Society, Women, Children, Fathers, Mothers, Words)
"I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers, If I belittle dogs and mothers."
- Ogden Nash
(Related: Hope, Dogs, Mothers, Tongue)
"I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house."
- John Forbes Nash, Jr.
(Related: Memories, Old, Play)
"There is a fundamental situation in which the country has reached rock bottom, that a mother can't send her children out of the house in the morning. The country has reached rock bottom and this needs to be changed."
- Benjamin Netanyahu
(Related: Mother, Children, Country, Needs)
"Growing up my mother played Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole in the house regularly."
- Aaron Neville
(Related: Mother, Growing up)
"Then I became a mother and it just fills every space, that isn't filled with something else important. It's just like this incredible balloon that blows up and fills life up."
- Thandie Newton
(Related: Life, Mother, Space)
"The bottom line in my view is that America's mothers and fathers deserve to have confidence in law enforcement's ability to ensure that their children are being raised in the safest possible environment."
- Bob Ney
(Related: Ability, America, Being, Children, Confidence, Environment, Fathers, Law, Mothers)
"You can make children believe whatever you want, and the children of today are the soldiers and mothers of tomorrow."
- Dudley Nichols
(Related: Children, Mothers, Soldiers, Today, Tomorrow, Want)
"The latest page I've been working is about the organization of the pantheon of the gods. Who's indebted to whom, how they are related, who screwed whose uncle or grandmother, all of that."
- Ben Nicholson
(Related: Gods)
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."
- Jack Nicholson
(Related: Mother, Son, Irony)
"Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Love, Mother, Father, Illusion)
"Fear is the mother of morality."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Mother, Morality, Fear)
"What's really fun is seeing mothers bringing their daughters to the shows. And the best part is the mothers know they don't have to worry about sexual innuendo in the songs. The shows are family shows."
- Peter Noone
(Related: Family, Daughters, Fun, Mothers, Songs, Worry)
"I owe a lot to my parents, especially by mother and my father."
- Greg Norman
(Related: Mother, Father, Parents)
"My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school."
- Douglass North
(Related: Life, Mother, Father, Company, Office, School)
"Who I really am is the mother of six kids and Woody's wife."
- Anne Northup
(Related: Mother, Wife, Kids)
"Anyone who doesn't miss the past never had a mother."
- Gregory Nunn
(Related: Mother, Past)
"My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur."
- Paul Nurse
(Related: Mother, Father, English, Houses, Parents, Years)
"Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive."
- Ann Oakley
(Related: Fitness, Society, Career, Woman)
"Being a good mother does not call for the same qualities as being a good housewife; a dedication to keeping children clean and tidy may override an interest in their separate development as individuals."
- Ann Oakley
(Related: Mother, Development, Being, Children, Dedication, Housewife, Interest, May)
"My family, frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead."
- Barack Obama
(Related: Faith, Life, Family, Mother, People, Christian, Church, Spiritual, Want)
"Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire."
- Edna O'Brien
(Related: Countries, Fathers, Mothers)
"My mother had taken me to photographer Paul Hesse, who used some of my pictures on magazine covers."
- Margaret O'Brien
(Related: Mother)
"Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father."
- Roger von Oech
(Related: Mother, Father, Invention, May, Necessity, Play)
"I was brought up by my mother and my two sisters, although they're older than me and fled the nest very young, so I was technically raised as an only child, but I was very much loved."
- Gary Oldman
(Related: Mother, Sisters)
"David Stern should get with the mothers of the NBA and let the moms decide what the dress code should be. I asked my mother if I could wear a chain, and she told me yeah. So I do stuff that my parents allow me to do."
- Shaquille O'Neal
(Related: Mother, Dress, Mothers, Parents)
"Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards."
- Robert Orben
(Related: Life, Mother, Father, Cards, Credit)
"I didn't know my mother had it. I think a lot of women don't know their mothers had it; that's the sad thing about depression. You know, you don't function anymore. You shut down. You feel like you are in a void."
- Marie Osmond
(Related: Women, Mother, Depression, Mothers)
"So, babies are taken from their mothers because they get temporarily insane and it's not the mother's fault. This is the thing: they shouldn't feel ashamed. They didn't cause this. It is not something they did to themselves."
- Marie Osmond
(Related: Mother, Babies, Cause, Fault, Mothers)
"It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you."
- Ouida
(Related: Work, Kiss, Mother, Hard work)
"My mother told me on several different occasions that she was livin' her dream vicariously through me. She once said that I was getting' to do all the things that she would have wanted to have done."
- Buck Owens
(Related: Mother, Dream)
"Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up."
- Camille Paglia
(Related: Mother, Identity, Man)
"My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive."
- Gwyneth Paltrow
(Related: Mother, Living, Pretty, Theatre)
"I'm a grandmother, and a mighty proud one."
- Sara Paretsky
"For when a child is born the mother also is born again."
- Gilbert Parker
(Related: Mother)
"Careful?! Was my mother careful when she stabbed me in the heart with a coat hanger while I was still in womb?"
- Trey Parker
(Related: Mother, Heart)
"My parents, especially my mother, were no influence on me whatsoever."
- Andy Partridge
(Related: Mother, Influence, Parents)
"I grew up in a house full of women: my mother, grandmother, three sisters, and two female cats. And I still have the buzz of their conversations in my head. As an adult, I have more female friends than male ones: I just love the way that women talk."
- James Patterson
(Related: Love, Women, Mother, Cats, Friends, Sisters, Talk)
"I used my mother's radio as a PA system. I'd take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker."
- Les Paul
(Related: Mother, Sound)
"There are people and nations, Mother, that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you in silence, I entrust them to you in the way that you know best."
- Pope John Paul II
(Related: Mother, People, Name, Nations, Silence)
"I kiss the soil as if I placed a kiss on the hands of a mother, for the homeland is our earthly mother. I consider it my duty to be with my compatriots in this sublime and difficult moment."
- Pope John Paul II
(Related: Kiss, Mother, Duty)
"Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see."
- Pope Paul VI
(Related: Mother, Land, Will, World)
"My mother gave me a sense of independence, a sense of total confidence that we could do whatever it was we set out to do. That's how we were raised."
- Robin Wright Penn
(Related: Mother, Confidence, Independence, Sense)
"I have a brother younger than me. My mother was a librarian, so from her, I got the taste to read."
- Shimon Peres
(Related: Mother, Brother, Taste)
"Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants."
- Martin Lewis Perl
(Related: Work, Mother, Father, Company, Printing, School)
"Once upon a time there was a widow who had two daughters. The elder was so much like her, both in looks and character, that whoever saw the daughter saw the mother."
- Charles Perrault
(Related: Time, Mother, Daughter, Character, Daughters)
"The gentleman had also a young daughter, of rare goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world."
- Charles Perrault
(Related: Mother, Daughter, Gentleman, Goodness, Sweetness, Temper, World)
"Her godmother simply touched her with her wand, and, at the same moment, her clothes were turned into cloth of gold and silver, all decked with jewels."
- Charles Perrault
(Related: Clothes, Gold, Jewels)
"It's hard and sometimes it's scary. It still amazes my mother. I went home for Christmas one year and there were fans all over the front lawn, hoping to see me."
- Luke Perry
(Related: Home, Mother, Christmas, Fans)
"Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away."
- Laurence J. Peter
(Related: Nature, Time, Mother, Father)
"I'd like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie."
- Bernadette Peters
(Related: Mother, Day, Play)
"Grissom comes from a place where we know he had a deaf mother, he was raised in a silent household, on some level, had a father who potentially was not around and he learned what he knew by himself in the back yard, with bugs and animals. He's not comfortable being a supervisor and that's his problem."
- William Petersen
(Related: Mother, Father, Animals, Being, Bugs)
"Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure."
- Petrarch
(Related: Mother, Cure, Disgust, Variety)
"Here we are to remember that in consequence of our opinion that labor is the Father and active principle of wealth, as lands are the Mother, that the state by killing, mutilating, or imprisoning their members do withal punish themselves."
- William Petty
(Related: Mother, Father, Wealth, Killing, Labor, Opinion, State)
"My mother was like a sister to me, only we didn't have sex quite so often."
- Emo Philips
(Related: Sex, Mother, Sister)