No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is...

Mothers were much too sharp. They were like dogs. Buster always sensed when anything was out of the ordinary, and so did mothers. Mothers and dogs both had a kind of second sight that made...

Imagine that the world had created a new ‘dream product’ to feed and immunize everyone born on earth. Imagine also that it was available everywhere, required no storage or delivery, and helped mothers plan their...

A good mother loves fiercely but ultimately brings up her children to thrive without her. They must be the most important thing in her life, but if she is the most important thing in theirs,...

Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?

Tereza’s mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because...

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward – always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that...

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

My first words, as I was being born […] I looked up at my mother and said, ‘that’s the last time I’m going up one of those.

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis … [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother’s Day card. There was a horrible,...

Not that she means anything by it, he knows. This is simply her lifelong habit of moderation at work, her need to tamp everything down to the routine, the modest, the tepid everyday. He understands...

Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about...

My mother’s deathchanged the alchemy of food.Holidays run together nowlike ungrooved rivers. I forgetwhat they are for. I buy bakery goods.They look deadunder the blue lights.I don’t do anything the way she taught mebut I...

[Judith Warner:] Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.

The cows are very good mothers.

Mothers are only human, you turn it over to God and then you just wing it.

Girls should be strong together. Strong like steel, merry like the tinkling of chimes dancing in the wind.

She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws. She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she...

Mama took me in her arms and held me tight. Her embrace was hot and she smelled like sweat, dust, and grease, but I wanted her. I wanted to crawl inside her mind to find...

There’s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.

We take a lot for granted as second wave feminists, what our mothers and aunts did for us.

In truth, it was also by design: as much as I loved my mother, she wasn’t often the person I sought for comfort in hard times. She disapproved tacitly of crying.

Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.

I can’t think why mothers love them. All babies do is leak at both ends.

Isn’t that what I always think when I get The Poor Motherless Girl Look? Like I’ve been shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes.

They are not kidding when they say that mothers are strong women. We need to be strong in more ways than our children will ever know.

I do not understand what makes mothers think they are walking-talking thermometers.But I think somewhere during the process of giving birth and changing diapers, they actually begin to belive they have this supernatural sense.

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have...

My mother was widely loved, and rightly so – and widely regarded as too sweet for words. Well, she had them buffaloed. Any woman who could out-stubborn a dachshund deserved to be accorded the wary...

It is such broad-minded mothers who are needed today. Good mothers are more essential than good wives.

God, He didn’t write the scripts for the puny little players downhere.We wrote them ourselves-with each day we lived, each word we spoke,each thought we etched on our brains. And Momma had written herscript, too.And...

I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of...

Girls,” their mother interjected, “you must both stop being strange – it is unattractive. And don’t forget your hats. It would be absolutely the end for me if you two came down with freckles at...

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see...

Why would you family think about it?””Oh, my mother’s the only one that counts, and she likes you very much from what she’s seen of you.””So you had me inspected?””No-dash ti all, I seem to...

Her son would be incomparably handsome, good and powerful. He would be the expected Messiah; it is fortunate for humanity that all mothers have this pathetic faith, without it mankind would not have the ever-renascent...

I would have dearly liked to close the French doors between us for a bit of peace, but Mam wouldn’t allow it; she said that solitude would give me ideas and the last thing a...

Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddening howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall...

When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman’s second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find...

I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your...

As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother’s blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as...

Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn’t see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That’s what mothers told...

If the Pentateuch is inspired, the civilization of of our day is a mistake and crime. There should be no political liberty. Heresy should be trodden out beneath the bigot’s brutal feet. Husbands should divorce...

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

The best love in the world, is the love of a man. The love of a man who came from your womb, the love of your son! I don’t have a daughter, but maybe the...

But my mother’s life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one...

Catholics have guilt and Jews have guilt, fine. But mothers can trump them all.

The mothers are very protective of their calves.

Some women just aren’t cut out to be mothers, and unfortunately it had taken Susanna three kids to realize she was one of them.

As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She...