Quotes About Motherhood

No matter what, like, I couldn't - I could break a world record, get an Olympic gold medal, and my mom would be, like, you could have done better. But you looked pretty. That's what she says all the time.

God commands worship but doesn't five it. After having spent a few moments with nothingness, he gave life to existence ... but where is nothingness now? Like a mother it gave birth to existence and then died in childbirth.

death of Ophelia while she was bringing Sebastian into the world. No

Se le plantó delante, casi hasta tocarlo con el cuerpo. Los brazos que ahora lo rodeaban no comunicaban pasión sino contención, un gesto de madre, de quien sostiene una maceta rota para no desparramar tierra por doquier, para evitar algo peor.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.

There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter—if she'd lived, as I'd grown older).

We talked about our real mothers and how we wanted to know who they'd been. Perhaps we ought not to have shared so much, but it was very comforting. "I wish I had a sister," she said to me one day. "And if I did, that person would be you.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.

Because if you weren't an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn't have a baby?

She didn't make the world the way it was, and she had been my mother, and I had loved her and she had loved me.

What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers.

By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother's account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That's what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to the force of gravity.

Saved by childbearing, I think. What did we suppose would save us, in the time before?

We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.

I remember thinking when the girls were born, first one and then the other, that I should have had sons and not daughters. I didn't feel up to daughters, I didn't know how they worked. I must have been afraid of hating them. With sons I would have known what to do.

after the man had left, the mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed willingly. They felt cheated as well, as if the price had been too low. Why hadn't they demanded more?

Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers.

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.

What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I'd pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer choices, and a great deal less was said.