Mother Quotations | Page 4

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.

As the daughter of a schoolteacher, I feel very strongly that the most important thing in school takes place right there in that classroom, and the interaction between the teacher and the child.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, 'One of these days I'm going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.' That's all I've ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.

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.

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.

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.

Proving I'm a good mother is the one achievement I'm most proud of. It's brought out the best in me.

No one understands my ills, nor the terror that fills my breast, who does not know the heart of a mother.

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.

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.

My mother was a children's librarian. I remember when traditional stories were revised for modern audiences until they bore only a nodding acquaintance with the originals, but were released as 'authentic Indian stories' when they were, in fact, nothing of the kind.

And when I look at my mother, I reflect on her strength and endurance. She's cranky sometimes, but she is lovable and loving. I'd be happy to be there at 86.

One of my earliest memories is of seeing my mother in her beach chair, reading a book under an umbrella by the water's edge while my sisters and I played beside her. Of all the life lessons she taught me, that is one of my favorites: to take time at a place I love, restore my spirit with books and the beach.

The young women in my classes are feisty and clever and believe, often with the passion of youthful optimism, that feminism is a battle already won. I worry for them - and for my daughters, too.

I am not really much interested in talking to adults, although I suppose practically every mother in the kingdom knows my name and my books. It's their children I love.

If I could, I would have my son on tour the whole time. But he has school, summer camp, and he has to see his mother.

My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage.

I reached a time in college when I didn't know what I wanted to do. At that time, women's careers were essentially nursing, secretarial and teaching. My mother advised me to get my teacher's certificate.

There was never a great man who had not a great mother.

I don't want to be too strict, because I think kids can get rebellious, but I want to raise my daughter to be passionate about doing good things and pursuing real things and hobbies instead of frivolous materialistic stuff.

If salt ocean is the Great Mother from whom all life has sprung, fresh water is the Nurse entrusted to nourish life within her wanderings and around her wave-lapped margins.

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.

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.

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren't consumed by technology and television. My mother insisted that her children read. To describe my scarce leisure time in today's terms, I always default to reading.

When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body - it's a blessing.

Angelina is my daughter and I am always wishing her the best.

The wisest advice I ever received regarding the kitchen came from my mother: 'Do the dishes while you're cooking.

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.

My mother was born on a tiny farm in County Mayo. She was meant to stay at home and look after the farm while her brother and sister got an education. However, she came to England on a visit and never went back.

I'm from a family of teachers. My father would drown me in the bathtub if my daughter didn't graduate from college. I don't care who she is or what she does. Just get the diploma.

Winston Churchill was not entirely British. His mother was American, making Sir Winston part Iroquois Indian.

If I tried to shout over my older brother, my mother told me keep quiet. If I tried to shout over my little sister, my father told me to shut up. I found the best way to be heard was to lower my voice and actually speak when I had something to say.

I'm a mother, I'm a journalist, I'm an American; I'm all of those things, and it really complicates your job when you have all these things come into play.

In their 30s women really start to live... they're not children anymore, and they're not just mothers.

When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!

I tried to stick to my game plan, which was always being aware of what my A story was - the love story between a father and his son, and that son and his daughter.

I learnt to sing in Bengali, my mother tongue, then went on to sing in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and every possible Indian language.

My sister Jennifer is an Emmy winning journalist and mother of three amazing girls. She brings an exceptional dedication to her job, her family, and her community, and has been a role model of mine for many, many years. I'm extremely proud of her.

I am a fashion designer. I'm not an environmentalist. When I get up in the morning, number one I'm a mother and a wife, and number two I design clothes. So the main thing I need to do is create, hopefully, exquisitely beautiful, desirable objects for my customer.

Never say anything on the phone that you wouldn't want your mother to hear at your trial.

I think of myself as Rebecca Wells from Lodi Plantation, in Central Louisiana, a girl who was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged creativity and didn't call me lazy or nuts when I dressed up in my mother's peignoirs and played the piano, having painted a small sign decorated in glitter that read 'The Piano Fairy Girl.

My daughter is, of course, perfect. Everyone's child is, but mine really is perfect. But I could not have raised her without my parents. From the time she was seven months until now, I have been a single parent.

I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.

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.

Necessity may well be called the mother of invention but calamity is the test of integrity.

I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin.

My biggest challenge every day is to be a great mother and a great businesswoman.

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my 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, All her majestic loveliness Chastened and softened and subdued Into a more attractive grace, And with a human sense imbued. He is the greatest artist, then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who follows Nature.

The only ones who like Milton Berle are his mother - and the public.

Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups.

The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.

What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.

My mother taught me to treat a lady respectfully.

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.

My mother worked in factories, worked as a domestic, worked in a restaurant, always had a second job.

All three of my parents - I also had a stepmother - were teachers, and my dad taught high school, and as he always reminded me when I was going to spend some money on something, 'Your mother and I, in the Depression, had to decide whether to spend a dime on a loaf of bread or if we could go to a movie with it.'

A mother who is obsessing about being thin and dieting and exercising is not going to be a very good mother.

Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

I had to put my kid before my career and all the money I was making. I decided to do the right thing. I was dying inside. If I didn't have my daughter, I would be dead right now, for sure.

As the daughter of a 25-year veteran of the armed forces, I am incredibly thankful for the sacrifices our women and men have made in Iraq, and continue to make in Afghanistan.

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.

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.

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.

Sunday is the day I connect with Buenos Aires. I speak to or text my mother every day, but on Sunday I phone everyone.

Eyebrows are really important because they structure the face. In school it was funny because I was always the one walking around with tweezers plucking my girlfriends' eyebrows. I was really good; eyebrow tweezing runs in my family - my mother used to do mine, and I picked it up.

To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects, and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung.

It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the 'bad girl' or the 'good girl' or the 'bad mother' or 'the good mother,' 'the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children' or 'the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,' all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.

Becoming a mother has been the best experience of my life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I think in any relationship, even in the healthiest of relationships, we are all parents to each other at times. I think that's a normal, healthy sort of relationship. I think there are times when we're each a mother and a father when we need to be.

I built the business exactly the way my mother built and ran her family. I wanted a replication of the big, happy family I grew up in. I wanted happy people having fun.

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What's the buzz on the street with the kids? She's going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren't into Kiss. But they've all been told that it's the greatest show on Earth.

Well, I think it's because I'm an only daughter. I have four brothers, a bunch of guy cousins, and so it's like I was raised amongst men. So I've always gotten along really well with men.

We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brothers winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

My most memorable meal is every Thanksgiving. I love the food: the turkey and stuffing; the sweet potatoes and rice, which come from my mother's Southern heritage; the mashed potatoes, which come from my wife's Midwestern roots; the Campbell's green-bean casserole; and of course, pumpkin pie.

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.

Of all the roles I've played, none has been as fulfilling as being a mother.

Every mother and daughter should make time for a trip together. It's good for the soul.

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.

My parents, especially my mother, were no influence on me whatsoever.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

I was born in Boston, but then I went down to Virginia. We spent a little time in Maryland, and then were in Virginia by the time I was seven. What struck me the most was that my mother thought that she had gone to the middle of nowhere, and we would still drive four hours for her to get her hair cut in Washington, D.C.

Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? The mother.

When I was six, my best friend's parents bought him a piano. My mother noticed that every time I would go to his house, the first thing I would say to him was 'Levester' - His name was Levester - I said, 'Levester, can I go play your piano?' So, on my 7th birthday, my parents bought me a piano.

My mother was a sociologist and an intellectual, and my father was an industrialist with a business in copper and aluminum wire. He was very strict and he wanted me to work in the family business - for him, the worst thing was having a daughter who worked in fashion.

I believe strongly in the rights of women... my mother is a woman, my sister is a woman, my daughter is a woman, my wife is a woman.

My life comes down to three moments: the death of my father, meeting my husband, and the birth of my daughter. Everything I did previous to that just doesn't seem to add up to very much.

I was scared when I lost my mother, my father, my brother, my sister,

Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.

As a partner in a firm full of women who work outside of the home as well as stay at home mothers, all with plenty of children, gender equality is not a talking point for me. It is an issue I live every day.

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.

I've been designing my own pieces for a long time. My mother's a jewelry designer, so we knew at some point we were going to do a line and dive into the fashion world.

There are now grandmothers and grandfathers coming to see us because they are of that age, they grew up in the '50s and '60s and they bring their sons and their daughters to hear the songs they heard when they were young.

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.

I think that people assumed I was white because of my last name. My father is Caucasian, my mother is Hispanic. But English was my second language, believe it or not.

I was raised in Brooklyn and in Baltimore. My father was a bookkeeper. When I was 36 years old, my mother told me I was adopted.

My earliest memory is dreamlike: in a small orchard or garden I am carried on the arm, I believe, of my father; there was a group of grown-ups, my mother among them, and the group was slowly walking in the orchard, it seems toward the house.

Mother Nature may be forgiving this year, or next year, but eventually she's going to come around and whack you. You've got to be prepared.