Quotes about mothers-and-daughters

Raquel Cepeda - Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

A mother isn’t the person who births you it’s the person who rears you and shows you love.

Amelia Hutchins - Playing with Monsters

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT PAGE: To my daughter, if you ever date anyone like the men I write, I will kick your *ss up between your ears and you will walk sideways for a month, but I’ll still love you.

Elizabeth Peters - The Hippopotamus Pool

Nefret was still pouting when Emerson helped her into the carriage. Emerson did not observe the pout. He would not have observed it (men being what they are) even if something had not distracted him.

Sonja Yoerg - House Broken

In a corner of her heart she imagined her compassion as kindling that could ignite not only her tender and guarded feelings for her mother, but also jump across the void and ignite her mother’s feelings for her.

Frances Hardinge -

My mother is not evil, Faith reminded herself. She is just a perfectly sensible snake, protecting her eggs and making her way in the world as best she can.

Margaret Atwood - Bluebeard's Egg

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal.

Margaret Atwood - Bluebeard's Egg

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal.

Kiana Davenport - Shark Dialogues

Common sense. Mothers are the last riddle, the worst horror, the only consolation.

Fiona Wood - Wildlife

Mothers are generally starvers or feeders

Rachael Hanel - We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter

Mom was the midwife who delivered stories to me.

Anna Quindlen - One True Thing

For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she'd let me go.

Azar Nafisi - Things I've Been Silent About: Memories

I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.

Eileen Granfors - Flash Warden and Other Stories

I never tired of picturing sharks.

Aspen Matis - Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn’t nurtured the potential of my strong and healthy independence.

Ruta Sepetys - Out of the Easy

The only reason I'd lift my skirt is to pull a pistol and plug you in the head.

Raquel Cepeda - Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

Listen kid, it’s just you and me now, so let’s help each other out. Always be honest with me, and show me how to be the mother and father I never had. I’ll make a mess of things sometimes, and I’m sorry in advance, but I’ll try. My word is bond.

Hilary Grossman - Plan Bea

No matter how old you are, you always want your mother’s love and acceptance. I guess I’m hoping one day I’ll get it back.

Jori Nunes - Chocolate Flowers

I smiled and looked at her- there she was with such a genuine grin and twinkle in her eyes. I kissed my mother on her forehead and took a long look in to her hazel eyes. I wondered when I would have the next chance to see her as I whispered, 'I love you." Mother didn't respond. She didn't look well- she had a tint of green and yellow to her skin and her thinning hair was a dull salt and pepper color, cut extra short and clinging to her scalp. She had no makeup on, which told me she just had no m

Erin Hunter - The Forgotten Warrior

I know there’s something troubling you. I’m not going to ask what it is, if you don’t want to tell me. But remember that I’m your mother. Nothing you say could ever shock me or make me love you less.

Kathy Hatfield - Lost then Found

Her voice was perfect, custom-made for my ears. I wanted to hit the record button in my brain and save this all for later. Half of me was listening to her words, but the other half was mesmerized by the melody.

Brit Bennett -

Maybe she'd never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn't know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

John Fowles - The Collector

M. I’ve never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. She’s always been my mother I’ve hated or been ashamed of. Yet of all the lame ducks I’ve met or heard of, she’s the lamest. I’ve never given her enough sympathy. I haven’t given her this last year (since I left home) one half of the consideration I’ve given the beastly creature upstairs just this last week. I feel that I could overwhelm her with love now. Because I haven’t felt so sorry for her for years. I’ve always excus

Annabelle R. Charbit -

My mother belonged to that group of low IQ individuals who find everything alarming and believe that raising your voice is the most effective form of communication.

Inna Swinton -

What kind of woman tells all her secrets?” my mother continued, flabbergasted and disappointed in me. “Especially anything that has to do with your body making babies! I know a woman who had no ovaries when she got married. Her husband found out only years later that they couldn’t have children. The two of them are happy together still; they live in a big house, and have a cute dog.

Laura Kasischke - White Bird in a Blizzard

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that's why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face.

Ama H. Vanniarachchy -

She is the creature of life, the giver of life, and the giver of abundant love, care and protection. Such are the great qualities of a mother. The bond between a mother and her child is the only real and purest bond in the world, the only true love we can ever find in our lifetime.

Janet Fitch - White Oleander

If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.... I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

Adrianna Stepiano -

I'm blessed and I couldn't be more grateful. Do you want to know why? Because I'm a mother, but that's only half of it. I'm blessed because, when I need to, I can still just be a daughter. I get the feeling that there is nothing more precious than to have both of these roles, simultaneously.

Corey Ann Haydu - The Careful Undressing of Love

I see my mother exactly as she is – sad and strong, tense and trying.

Melia Keeton-Digby - The Heroines Club: A Mother-Daughter Empowerment Circle

We mothers have a wonderfully precious and truly powerful role to play in the future self-images of our daughters. The truth is, the most effective way to inculcate in our daughters a fighting chance at life-long self-love and empowerment is not in the books we read to them, or the workshops we send them to, or the media we do or do not expose them to, or even the things we tell them, rather it is in the reflection of self-love and empowerment they see in us, their mothers. The model of our own

Melia Keeton-Digby - The Heroines Club: A Mother-Daughter Empowerment Circle

Mothers and daughters together are a powerful force to be reckoned with

Aspen Matis - Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

My mother overstated the dangers of the world – invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren’t truly real.

Aspen Matis - Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement—a rebellion. I didn’t try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive.

Aspen Matis - Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness.

Katie Hafner - Mother Daughter Me

Doing a geographic” is a term alcoholics often use for acting on the impulse to start over by moving to a new town, or state, instead of making any internal changes. It’s the anywhere-but-here part of the disease that says, “Remove yourself from this, go someplace new, and everything will be better.” Two years into our Florida stint, my mother pulled a geographic as radical as the move from Rochester. The new plan was to head for California. She enrolled in the mathematics graduate program at th

Katie Hafner - Mother Daughter Me

I usually enjoy setting up a new kitchen, but this has become a joyless and highly charged task. My mother and I each have our own set of kitchen boxes, which means that if there are two cheese graters between us, only one will make it into a cupboard. The other will be put back in a box or given to Goodwill. Each such little decision has the weight of a Middle East negotiation. While her kitchenware is serviceable, I’m a sucker for the high end: All-Clad saucepans and Emile Henry pie dishes. Be

Katie Hafner - Mother Daughter Me

When I was five and Sarah seven, my mother went on a trip. She was gone from our home in Rochester, New York, for several days. But she was often gone — not always from the house but missing from our lives nonetheless. Then one day Sarah and I returned from school to find her standing at the door, a piñata in her hand, smiling her spellbinding, I-am-overjoyed-at-the-sight-of-you smile. Now when I imagine that scene, my mind’s eye puts a sombrero on her head, but I doubt she was wearing one. She

Katie Hafner - Mother Daughter Me

Suddenly life was good, even glamorous. We were poor but didn’t know it, or maybe we did know, but we didn’t care, because my mother had stopped disappearing into her bedroom. Our apartment building was surrounded by empty lots, which were all that separated us from the ocean. Within a couple of decades, those stretches of undeveloped land – prime coastline real estate –would be built upon, with upscale apartment complexes and million-dollar houses with ocean views. But in 1967, those barren lot

Rachel Hauck - The Writing Desk

Youth isn't all it's cracked up to be either.""Then you're doing it wrong.

Alison Bechdel - Are You My Mother?

Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - Before We Visit the Goddess

My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - Before We Visit the Goddess

Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.

Thornton Wilder - The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song.

Brenda Sutton Rose -

By noon, silence arrives one last time, flowing into every space of her room. And before long, silence swallows sound and color and seconds and equations and entire stanzas of old poetry, leaving new words. The sheets are breathless. The room is bruised.My mother is still warm.

Elizabeth Strout - Amy and Isabelle

Through the trees there was a motion, a person walking on the road. Isabelle watched as the girl - it was Amy - moving slowly and with her head down, came up the gravel driveway. The sight of her pained Isabelle. It pained her terribly to see her, but why?Because she looked unhappy, her shoulders slumped like that, her neck thrust forward, walking slowly, just about dragging her feet. This was Isabelle's daughter; this was Isabelle's fault. She hadn't done it right, being a mother, and this yout

Diane L. Randle - Spectral Witness

Jeopardy, Mom! You have got to get on Jeopardy! Seriously! You could marry Alex Trebek! You could be Alex and Alex Trebek! You could be Alex SQUARED!

Janet Fitch - White Oleander

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you

Diane Samuels - Kindertransport: A Drama

Please tell me the truth about yourself.

Raquel Cepeda - Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

Lately, Mami’s eyes have been so dark, I don’t like looking into them because I’m afraid I’ll fall in.

Adrienne Rich - Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

Ellen J. Barrier -

A mother’s love is like an everlasting bed of roses, that continues to blossom. A mother’s love bears strength, comfort, healing and warmth. Her beauty is compared to a sunny day that shines upon each rose petal and inspires hope.

Cristina García - Dreaming in Cuban

Papi, I don't know what to do anymore." Lourdes begins to cry. "No matter what I do, Pilar hates me.""Pilar doesn't hate you, hija. She just hasn't learned to love you yet.

Danielle Crittenden - What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman

By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only about yourself, and having responsibility to no one but yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age.

Vicki Courtney - Five Conversations You Must Have with Your Daughter

It seems to me that if God felt it best to delay marriage into the latter part of your twenties, He would also see fit to delay the hormonal urge to want to have sex. Or perhaps it was never His intent to delay marriage in an effort to "become more independent," "enjoy singlehood," and "build our careers.

Sarah Weeks - Pie

Alice wondered if her mother was aware that she wasn’t the only one in town who’d come down with a bad case of Blueberry Fever.

April Paine - 3 Weeks: Using the Buddy System to Fight Fat

Am I alone in this mother-food connection or does being with your mom trigger the sudden and voracious need for large amounts of mac & cheese, rice pudding, and the scraps along the side of a bowl of cookie dough?

Kiana Davenport - Shark Dialogues

Got something to do with guilt,' Toro said. 'Her mother,neh?' 'Guilt. Longing. Got something to do with all of us.

Trevor Cole - Hope Makes Love

My mother is a certainty. I can count on the watercolour pain in her voice when she calls to say she hasn't heard from me in months. The precarious laughter as she comes from the kitchen, when I finally do appear on her doorstep, the laughter that says I might be a chickadee that's alighted unexpectedly on her thumb.

Trevor Cole - Hope Makes Love

My mother may no longer be (if she ever was) a mast to which I can rope myself. But I fear the loss of Lesley. Without her observance, and her sturdy presence, I would feel windblown.

Alan Kinross - Longinus The Vampire: Babylon

As the High Priestess looked down upon the child, she was struck by her holy perfection. She was a tiny person in miniature, and her beautiful eyes, little hands, and long eyelashes were sublime.

Diyar Harraz - Like The Starlings

I could just felt the twinge of resentment with her being there, where my mother was supposed to be. What right did she have, to replace that place?

Karen Essex - Dracula in Love

I was a married woman! she said. Why does every generation believe it is the discoverer of pleasure? Your father was a spectacular lover. Even through the wall, I could hear the triumph in her voice.

Danu Morrigan -

Invalidation is about dismissing your experiences, thoughts and above all your emotions. Indeed the intention is to not even allow you to have those thoughts, experiences and emotions. It‟s a way of invading your head and reprogramming it. It‟s psychological abuse (messing with your thoughts) and emotional abuse (messing with your feelings).

Evelyn Smith - The Summer of Secrets

Sweetheart the doctor gave you the okay, and your friends will be there. It's okay to live your life. You can't be afraid at every turn.

Kim Dong Hwa - The Color of Earth

My beloved has arrived, but rather than greeting him, All I can do is bite the corner of my apron with a blank expression- What an awkward woman am I. My heart has longed for him as hugely and openly as a full moonBut instead I narrow my eyes, and my glance to him Is sharp and narrow as the crescent moon. But then, I'm not the only one who behaves this way. My mother and my mother's mother were as silly and stumbling as I am when they were girls...Still, the love from my heart is overflowing, As

Jami Attenberg - All Grown Up

Look, you had it easier than me,' she says. 'You think Nana and Papa were busy supporting women's rights? No, they wanted me to meet a nice man and get married and cook and clean for him and give them grandchildren, and that's it. You were born into a world where feminism existed and was readily available to you. I had to acquire that knowledge. I didn't know I could be on my own.

Narissa Doumani -

Whosoever does not believe in the existence of a sixth sense has clearly not regarded their own mother. How it is they know all they know about you, even those secrets you locked away so tightly in the most hidden compartments of your heart, remains one of the great mysteries of the world. And they don't just know—they know instantly.

Heather Gudenkauf - The Weight of Silence

Having a little girl has been like following an old treasure map with the important paths torn away.

Viola Shipman - The Charm Bracelet

A Mother & Daughter's Love Is Never Separated

Zadie Smith - NW

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

Sandra Vischer - Unliving the Dream

The woman who is my best friend, my teacher, my everything: Mom.

Ashly Lorenzana - Speed Needles

I was unhappy there and going through a rough transition, so I was desperate for any friend I could find that I could talk to. I thought that's what he was. We had this secret from my mom, who I didn't like much at the time. It was a harmless secret, so I didn't feel bad about it. All we did was go to the movies and hang out doing fun things all day. It wasn't until much later that the warning signs began, but I was still too young and stupid to see them for what they were at the time. Basically

Diane Samuels - Kindertransport: A Drama

Don't even try making out I’m making this up. I’ve got proof. Evidence.

Diane Samuels - Kindertransport: A Drama

Why won’t you help me?
You have to able to manage on your own.

Diane Samuels - Kindertransport: A Drama

What I want is irrelevant. This is your life, Faith.

Munia Khan - Beyond The Vernal Mind

My arrivalHer womb’s delightHer existenceMy living lightHer woundsMy scarsHer skiesMy starsHer daysMy hoursHer strengthMy powersI breathe my name Being her childWithout motherLife’s beguiledFrom the poem 'Mother

Maria Semple - Bernadette

When “Here Comes the Sun” started, what happened? No, the sun didn’t come out, but Mom opened up like the sun breaking through the clouds. You know how in the first few notes of that song, there’s something about George’s guitar that’s just so hopeful? It was like when Mom sang, she was full of hope, too. She even got the irregular clapping right during the guitar solo. When the song was over, she paused it.“Oh, Bee,” she said. “This song reminds me of you.” She had tears in her eyes.

Ted Kooser - Delights and Shadows

Mother (fragment)...You asked me if I would be sad when it happenedand I am sad. But the iris I moved from your housenow hold in the dusty dry fists of their rootsgreen knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.Were it not for the way you taught me to lookat the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.

Brit Bennett - The Mothers

Why should she dress in a cap and gown and sweat in the sun, when her mother was not there to pose in pictures with her and cheer when her name was called? In her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take, arms around each other, her mother gaining little wrinkles around her eyes from smiling so much.

Karen Fowler - Memories For Sale

Coming home seemed to have started the healing process. No longer vivid and garish, the memories seemed to be covered in gossemer, fading behind a curtain of time and forgiveness.

Cecil Woodham-Smith - From her Birth to the Death of the Prince Consort

The Queen (Victoria) wrote generously to her mother, 'I quite understand your feelings on the occasion of Sir John Conroy's death. . . I will not speak of the past and the many sufferings he entailed on us by creating divisions between you and me which could never have existed otherwise, they are buried with him.. For his poor wife and children I am truly sorry." Thanking the Queen for her letter the Duchess of Kent wrote 'Yes, Sir John Conroy's death was a most painful shock. I shall not try an

Ruta Sepetys - Salt to the Sea

Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean. Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land

Jessica Shattuck - The Women in the Castle

There is not enough air in the room for Marianne and Elizabeth to share. They have learned this the hard way, but acceptance of the fact has made life easier. Now they see each other twice a year, for a weekend in the early summer and for the American holiday of Thanksgiving

Diyar Harraz - Like The Starlings

I never settled with anything. It was like a pendulum; swinging back and forth but never reached a comatose state. As a sequence of events around me unfolded, I struggled to understand who I was, whose child I was and whether I would ever find a way home.

Alison Bechdel -

She has given me a way out.

Yassin Hall - or other forms of menta

It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.

Peggy Toney Horton - Somewhere in Heaven My Mother Is Smiling

Ah, how quickly the hands on the clock circle toward the future we thought was far away! And how soon we become our mothers.

Unknown -

Empowered women empower women.

Coco Chanel -

If you're sad, add more lipstick and attack!

Yvonne Prinz - The Vinyl Princess

Oh here's a nice one, he brown recluse spider. This once resides in wooded areas. In other words, next to my head while I'm sleeping. ' In a small number of cases, a bite from a brown recluse can produce organ damage with occasional fatalities.' ""That's the worst-case scenario. how can it be? It's called a 'recluse'""It's been my experience that all recluses have a mean streak.

James Salter - Light Years

You must go further than I did," Nedra said. "You know that.""Further?""With your life. You must become free."She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.

Tania De Rozario - And the Walls Come Crumbling Down

I am a wall. I am a wall. I am a wall. I am a giant and I tower above you. I am a giant and I can't hear your voice. There is familiarity in this. I spent years like this growing up, my mother hovering over my every move, me responding monosyllabically, face blank, voice blank, heart blank. It is a coping mechanism and it is easy, if you are able to block out false promises of love with the understanding of what love has become.

Evy Michaels -

I could feel her heart break from a thousand miles away, I cried her tears, I mourned her loss. I saw the pain beneath that smile, the strength behind those eyes. Our silence spoke about our presence...What a conniving double edged sword pain is, breaking and binding us concurrently. Such a profound thing love is, that someone once a stranger I now call mother

Unknown -

Inhale courage, exhale fear.

Jennifer Crusie - Maybe This Time

North is a powerful man, and you're still connected to him." Flo frowned. "Probably sexual memory, those Capricorns are insatiable. Well, you know. Sea Goat. And of course, you're a Fish. You'll end up back in bed with him."Andie slammed the car door. "You know what I'd like for Christmas, Flo? Boundaries. You can gift me early if you'd like.

Kristin Cashore - Bitterblue

Madlen came to sit beside her on the bed. "Lady Queen," she said with her own particular brand of rough gentleness. "It is not the job of the child to protect her mother. It's the mother's job to protect the child. By allowing your mother to protect you, you gave her a gift. Do you understand me?

Melanie Crowder - A Nearer Moon

You’ll see,” Mother assured her. “The fish will be just as friendly and the waves just as fresh in the new world the door makers find for us.

Karen Swallow Prior - Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me

From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.

Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alri

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