c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Cats speak the language of comfort and coolness and therefore we feel comfortable and cool whenever we see a cat!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
He who knows to be afraid has a higher chance of living!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If a choice is given to us between being mortal and being immortal, you will find no one in the group of mortals!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Countries which are governed by the dabblers will undoubtedly turn into the miserable countries!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
For the cowards, all doors are locked; for the daring, all doors are open!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Cats strongly believe that everywhere is designed for their comfort!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The best dancer is the one who isn’t even aware that she is dancing!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Let fascism find not even a single passage to power or else that poisonous snake will infiltrate into the every vital corner of the country and kill the future of the nation!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If you are doing whatever a shepherd is ordering you to do, then you are a real sheep, a poor submissive being!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When you are unhappy, do not resist it! Let your unhappiness do its turn. After that the turn comes to the happiness!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If one part of a country is watching football match while the other part of the same country is under heavy attacks by the rockets, then we can say that there is no nation in that country, but there is only crowd of people!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When a state is afraid of the journalists, it means that that state is definitely doing some secret devilish things!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The best thing you can give to a child is to create an environment where the child can develop an independent mind so that he will be the man of no one and the instrument of no system!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Our real power in life comes from our true thinking!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Stick to the honesty and never leave it!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If you can’t control it, you will be the toy of your own mind!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Great thoughts cannot remain silent. They are born to scream!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The untrue things don’t deserve to be respected!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The goodnesses you do will beautifully cover you like the beautiful flowers covering a country house!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Simple things have greater power than the complicated things!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When a great moment arises, it is great to be right there!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Spend time for yourself, walk in solitude, refresh your mind and body so that you can spend time for others and walk with them! Spend time for yourself!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When the life is wavy, keep your mind smooth!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Mothers are all slightly insane.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.
— Stephen King
You could run from someone you feared, you could try to fight someone you hated. All my reactions were geared toward those kinds of killers – the monsters, the enemies. When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?
— Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn
Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.
— Jodi Picoult, Perfect Match
Motherhood is a choice you make everyday, to put someone else's happiness and well-being ahead of your own, to teach the hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you're not sure what the right thing is...and to forgive yourself, over and over again, for doing everything wrong.
— Donna Ball, At Home on Ladybug Farm
A mother knows what her child's gone through, even if she didn't see it herself.
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Gadis Pantai
She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated off-spring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.I look at him and see the baby I held in my arms, dewing besotted, unable to believe that I'd created another human being. I see the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied  by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history.
— Jojo Moyes, Me Before You
Motherhood is near to divinity. It is the highest, holiest service to be assumed by mankind.
— Howard W. Hunter
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
— G.K. Chesterton
New mothers enter the world of parenting feeling much like Alice in Wonderland.-	Being a mother is one of the most rewarding jobs on earth and also one of the most challenging.-	Motherhood is a process. Learn to love the process.-	There is a tremendous amount of learning that takes place in the first year of your baby’s life; the baby learns a lot, too.-	It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the fantasy of what you thuoght motherhood would be like, and what you thought you would be like as a mother, with reality.-	Take care of yourself. If Mommy isn’t happy, no one else in the family is happy either.-	New mother generally need to lower their expectations.-	A good mother learns to love her child as he is and adjusts her mothering to suit her child.
— Debra Gilbert Rosenberg
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
— Anna Quindlen
A mother has far greater influence on her children than anyone else, and she must realize that every word she speaks, every act, every response, her attitude, even her appearance and manner of dress affect the lives of her children and the whole family. It is while the child is in the home that he gains from his mother the attitudes, hopes, and beliefs that will determine the kind of life he will live and the contribution he will make to society.
— N. Eldon Tanner
In the book Soldiers on the Home Front, I was greatly struck by the fact that in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. An what's her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she's disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, hear beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over – empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up.
— Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons
Supermom wasn't a bad job description. The pay was lousy if you were talking about real money. But the payoff was priceless in so many other ways.
— Roxanne Henke
So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.
— Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
It's sad if people think that's (homemaking) a dull existance, [but] you can't just buy an apartment and furnish it and walk away. It's the flowers you choose, the music you play, the smile you have waiting. I want it to be gay and cheerful, a haven in this troubled world. I don't want my husband and children to come home and find a rattled woman. Our era is already rattled enough, isn't it?
— Audrey Hepburn
Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done.
— Rebecca Woolf
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.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
There is eternal influence and power in motherhood.
— Julie B. Beck
In my previous life I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be- but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art. 
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
I think all mothers are alike, regardless of cultural background, when it comes to illogical cleaning.
— Neal Shusterman, Antsy Does Time
I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love & duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting & challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.
— Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say What light and two more to say I didn't turn it on.
— Erma Bombeck
The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . Memories of mother drying my tears, reading aloud, cutting cookies and singing as she did, listening to prayers I said as I knelt with my forehead pressed against her knee, tucking me in bed and turning down the light. They have carried me through the years and given my life such a firm foundation that it does not rock beneath flood or tempest.
— Margaret Sanger
How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
— G.K. Chesterton
She had watched other women with infants and eventually understood what she craved: the boundless permission-no, the absolute necessity- to hold and kiss and stroke this tiny person. Cradling a swaddled infant in their arms, mothers would distractedly touch their lips to their babies' foreheads. Passing their toddlers in a hall, mothers would tousle their hair even sweep them up in their arms and kiss them hard along their chins and necks until the children squealed with glee. Where else in life, Mabel wondered, could a woman love so openly and with such abandon?
— Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child
I could not get my fill of looking.There should be a song for women to sing at this moment or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name that moment.
— Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. 
— Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories
Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand.
— Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. I don’t think it’s such a big thing anymore, but the idea that you sacrifice everything for your children—it’s a load of rubbish. It leads to very destructive living and thinking, and it has a much worse effect on children than if you go out and live your own life. You’re meant to adore your children at all times, and you’re not meant to have a bad thought about them. That’s facism, you know, and it’s elevating the child at the expense of the mother. It’s like your life is not valid except in fulfilling this child’s needs. What about all your needs, your desires, your wants, your problems? They’re going to come out anyway, so it’s better they’re acknowledged straight off. Having said that, I really do believe that children have to be protected. They have to be loved. Somewhere between the two, I think, something needs to be sorted out. The relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex. There’s every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would alleviate them in some way
— Marina Carr
Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.
— Jodi Picoult, House Rules
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?
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
Here's what I hadn't realized: the mother you haven't seen for almost thirty-six years isn't your mother, she's a stranger. Sharing DNA doesn't make you fast friends. This wasn't a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.
— Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
Her eyes were open, taking in my tired face... Her face twitched into what looked like a squinty smile, and in her wordless expression I saw gratitude, and relief, and trust. I wanted, desperately, not to disappoint her.
— Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers
A mother is a mother from the moment her baby is first placed in her arms until eternity. It didn't matter if her child were three, thirteen, or thirty.
— Sarah Strohmeyer, Kindred Spirits
I think motherhood is the noblest task of all, because you cannot do it at your convenience, or tailor it to suit your preferences. You have to be ready to give up everything when you take on this task: your time, restful nights, your hobbies, your pursuit of physical fitness, any beauty you may have had, and all of the private little pleasures you might have counted as a right, from late dinners and long soaks in the tub to weekend excursions and cycling trips…I’m not saying you can’t have any of these things, but you have to be ready to let them all go if you’re going to have children and put them first.
— Johann Christoph Arnold, Endangered: Your Child in a Hostile World
...moms, even good ones, sometimes lose it a little so as not to lose it all.
— Susan Squire
Having kids — the responsibility of rearing good, kind, ethical, responsible human beings — is the biggest job anyone can embark on
— Maria Shriver
Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
— Nicole Krauss, Great House
The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you.You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child.If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper.So you do it.But you don't just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child....There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done.And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.
— Catherine de Hueck Doherty
You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.
— Elissa Schappell, Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction
Anne looked at the white young mother with a certain awe that had never entered into her feelings for Diana before. Could this pale woman with the rapture in her eyes be the little black-curled, rosy-cheeked Diana she had played with in vanished schooldays? It gave her a queer desolate feeling that she herself somehow belonged only in those past years and had no business in the present at all.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
...after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.
— Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
— Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.
— Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.
— Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
As Ramses did the same for his mother, he saw that her eyes were fixed on him. She had been unusually silent. She had not needed his father's tactless comment to understand the full implications of Farouk's death. As he met her unblinking gaze he was reminded of one of Nefret's more vivid descriptions. 'When she's angry, her eyes look like polished steel balls.' That's done it, he thought. She's made up her mind to get David and me out of this if she has to take on every German and Turkish agent in the Middle East.
— Elizabeth Peters, He Shall Thunder in the Sky
Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven
That means you're my kid," I explained, "and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees, With Related Readings
And when she [her daughter] one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends,For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
Most of us love a non-self, or something extrinsic and apart from our inner life; but a mother's love during the time she is a flesh-and-blood ciborium is not for a non-self but for one that is her very self, a perfect example of charity and love which hardly perceives a separation. Motherhood then becomes a kind of priesthood. She brings God to man by preparing the flesh in which the soul will be implanted; she brings man to God in offering the child back again to the Creator.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living
-	A mother, a real mother with a little child, thinks day and night about the welfare of the little one in her arms. A mother knows what dangers the child will have to encounter as he grows up. She does not let the father reassure her when he makes light of things and says that the children have to find their own way.A mother worries, for she carries the burden, and she often sees much deeper than the father just where the child is in danger.
— Johann Christoph Blumhardt
Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is place in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no others hands the sacred and holy trust given to her.
— J.R.    Miller
I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.
— Ayelet Waldman
I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.
— Jodi Picoult, House Rules
Then she rushes to pick up Asha from school, where she is known only as "Asha's mom" by the other mothers, who seem to all spend a lot of time together. Somer has no time for the PTA and bake sales. She has no time for herself. Her profession no longer defines her, but neither does being a mother. Both are pieces of her, and yet they don't seem to add up to a whole.
— Shilpi Somaya Gowda, Secret Daughter
Half the time your kids end up hating you for at least 5 of their teenage years[.] And don't ever expect anything so mundane as a thank you
— Donna Ball, At Home on Ladybug Farm
[On visitors after having a new baby...] "Put a lock on the door, barricade it if you have to. No one gets past that front door unless they come bearing one of two things: food or cleaning products!
— Claudine Wolk, It Gets Easier! And Other Lies We Tell New Mothers
So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary's College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.
— Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians
Later, when I was a new mother, I recognized her somewhat awestruck fascination with me. When you are fully immersed in the daily care and quirks and habits of a small, dependent child, an older kid who is articulate, civilized, and capable of moving around in the world without getting itself killed can seem as supernatural as a wizard.
— Kate Moses, Cakewalk: A Memoir
Are we always to be wantingwhat isn't:the greenest grassaccord and principlemotherhood and career?Yet our age lies to uslike an asp,whispering. "Both.
— Barbara Crooker
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.
— Adrianna Stepiano
Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.
— M.L. Stedman, La luce sugli oceani
Our children want more than presents, that want our PRESENCE.
— Heather Schuck, The Working Mom Manifesto
You know you're a mom when you open the door to the dishwasher mid-cycle and think, 'This is the closest I'm going to get to a spa treatment till next Mother's Day.'""Joining the words 'Lose Weight, Effortlessly!' in the same sentence may be a form of hate speech.""Try to make time for the things that are important, not just the things that are urgent.""I want my work to matter, my words to count for the good, and to spread some good cheer along the way.
— Judy Gruen
Progress is hardly ever dramatic; in fact, it is usually very slow. As every parent and teacher knows, education is never a matter of ten-step plans or quick formulas, but of faithful commitment to the mundane challenges of daily life: getting up from the sofa to spend time with our children, loving them and disciplining them, becoming involved in their lives at school and, most important, making sure they have a wholesome family life to return to at home. Maybe that is why Jesus teaches us to ask for strength little by little, on a daily basis - "Give us this day our daily bread" - and why he stresses the significance of even the smallest, humblest beginnings: "Wherever two of you agree about anything you ask for, it shall be done for you... For where two or three come together in my name, I shall be with them" (Mt. 18:19-20).
— Johann Christoph Arnold, A Little Child Shall Lead Them: Hopeful Parenting in a Confused World
Mother doesn't cook, Ignatius said dogmatically, She burns.
— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
-	It is clear that we have to come down a bit from the high horse of reason on which we enjoy sitting. We have to be simple and take time to think how to make things understandable to the little ones. We have to become children again, and some find that too hard.
— Johann Christoph Blumhardt, Thoughts About Children
I know less than you thought, but more than you realize.
— jasmine wilmany
The Mother of God is asked to 'pray zealously to her Son and her God,' and the words of the psalm are put into her mouth:'My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. for He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.' It is because of her child that she says this, He will magnify her ('For He that is mighty hath done to me great things'): He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For everyone of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men-it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
(Georgie) I hated going to the playground EVERYDAY. If someone had only told me it wouldn't last forever
— Nancy Woodruff, My Wife's Affair
I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being-- the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person-- than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation.
— Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
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. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies.
— Harriet Jacobs
People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, "The baby is crying, you should feed her," and the maternal grandmother will say, "Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?
— Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom
Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
I know the well of my maternal incompetence is deep but I am determined to siphon up a calm and breathing hope for him.
— Donna VanLiere, The Good Dream
I was in charge. Of it all. All the time. For ever.
— Dorothy Koomson, My Best Friend's Girl
The phrase "working mother" is redundant.
— Jane Sellman
Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand.
— James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan
...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me.
— Charlotte Brontë, Villette
Every working mother has the things she dreads, things that keep her up in the night – pink eye, an ear infection, the parent-teacher conference, the school play – all forcing her to remind the people she works with that she is not, in fact, wholly devoted to business enterprises, but has another secret life. For me, the night terror is the 5 a.m. phone call from the nanny.
— Emily Roberson
These girls probably use double negatives and watch "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" with their babies instead of reading Eric Carle.
— Natalie Taylor
God save me ere I have any babies. They are grabby, clingy creatures who steal your figure and always want a ribbon or a wooden sword. And who sometimes make you die bearing them.
— J. Anderson Coats, The Wicked and the Just
I loved Duncan and I loved being his mother but I wasn't sure I was prepared to be only his mother. Before we were even married, when Russell and I had gotten our dog, Humbert, I had walked him early one morning, and as I stood on a line for coffee, someone had offered him a dog treat. "I always ask the mommy first," she said, looking at him expectantly. "Oh, I'm not his mother," I said, "I'm just his...friend," and she looked at me with complete contempt. "You're his mother," she had scolded, "Poor dog.
— Jennifer Belle, The Seven Year Bitch
Poor woman! She probably thought change of air might agree with many of her children.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
When I wasn’t in the barn garden, helping out, sorting seeds or checking hoses I’d spend time alone, usually in the bathroom adjacent to Joel’s room, staring into the shattered mirror as my hand gently caressed my baby bump.More often than not I would cry. Not because my pregnancy upset me, or that my hormones were getting the better of me, but because I missed Joel, my baby’s father. That the baby would grow up without a dad made me anxious. Then again, if he had survived, what irreparable damage would he have suffered and how would his pain translate to his child? Jesus, I was studying myself in the very mirror he’d smashed the night he chose to take his own life.The bump had grown slowly in the last couple of months. With these limited resources, I didn’t have the privilege of eating whatever I craved. Had that been the case, I was sure I would have been bigger by now. Still, I tried to eat as well and as often as I could and the size of my belly had proven that my attempts at proper nutrition were at least growing something in there.Nothing made me happier than feeling my baby move. It was a constant source of relief for me. In our present circumstances, with no vitamins and barely any meat products save the recent stash of jerky Earl had found in an abandoned trailer, my diet consisted of berries, lettuce, and canned beans for the most part. Feeling the baby move inside me was an experience I often enjoyed alone. I would think of Joel then as well. Imagining his hand on my belly, with mine guiding his to the kicks and punches.
— Michael Poeltl, Rebirth
Excuse my dress. I was half an hour late this morning. When you lose half an hour in this house, you never can pick it up again, try how you may. -Reverend Finch's wife
— Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch
It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?
— Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
I definitely haven’t been in the best place while working on this book, but I can say this much: Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real anger; where there is love, it is real love. You’ve been taking this journey with me, and you’re always going to get the best of what I’ve got. That’s what my mother would want.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky
Lavinia has seen this happen, seen how, one day, a girl will raise her head to listen, as if for the first time, to the crying of a child, to the sound of an oar being hauled in, to a man's voice, to the screech of a saw pulling through wood, to some comment one of the women might make. Within a week, the girl will be able to tell at any minute of the day or night, precisely where every soul in the place is. Then - or so Lavinia imagines, for it has never happened to her - one morning before light, before the girl has awakened, a map, new and totally different, will be imprinted behind her closed eyelids.
— Bernice Morgan, Random Passage
It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty of perfidy, but when a woman has become a mother her duty is greater because nature has entrusted the human species to her. If she fails then she is a coward, unworthy and infamous.
— Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean
...in the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all first-time mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment.
— Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
I remember at that time I went to the hairdresser's. I did this regularly, but I remember that visit for two particular reasons. The first was that next to me was a young mother with a little girl aged about three. The child, whose hair was about to be cut for the first time, screamed with terror and clung to her mother. The hairdresser stood by gravely, comb in hand: he recognised that this was a serious moment. The mother, blushing, tried to comfort the child who had suddenly plunged into despair; all around the shop women smiled in sympathy. What impressed me, and what I particularly remember, was the child's passionate attempt to re-enter her mother, the arms locked around the woman's neck, the terrified cries of unending love. So dangerous is it to be so close! I had tears in my eyes, witnessing that bond, seeing that closeness, of which only a sorrowful memory remained in my own life. One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilised, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.
— Anita Brookner, Brief Lives
But that was long ago. She has long since lost interest in motives, in the details of other women's crimes. Even the hatchet makes its usual sense. A mother who loves her child with all her self is only so far from the hatchet anyway; one casual swing and it's done. Hatred, love, all muddled up in that space inside a whisper, when the words don't matter anymore, when the baby's half asleep and you can carry it all the way there if you want, on nothing but the tone of your voice. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Sing it as softly as you like—the words clench their own teeth. The child still falls.
— Emily Ruskovich, Idaho
And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.
— Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply
...it was hard to be a mother when you had never been mothered yourself. Your children's needs remind you of your needs. Their pain reminds you of your pain. All of it reminds you of how bad it felt, how hard it was, how much you wanted and needed and didn't get. It's very hard.
— Sarah Dunn, The Arrangement
I have often observed that the state of motherhood can turn quite ordinary females into heroines . . .
— Kate Saunders, The Secrets of Wishtide
She has had any number of foals. I yield to her judgement.
— Katherine  Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale
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.I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
If we wear our nursing covers backwards like capes, then everyone can see we're breastfeeding superheroes.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding Is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do it Anyway
I think I would scream too if someone violently jammed a big ass breast in my mouth.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do It Anyway
The physical relief of having fully drained boobs cannot be overstated.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do It Anyway
Heaven is the feeling of hand warmers on sore nipples.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do It Anyway
Go hug a nursing mom -- but not too hard. Her boobs may hurt.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do It Anyway
I can absolutely assure you that birth is nothing like holding an ice cube in your hand for a minute and breathing through the "pain.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do It Anyway
In case you haven't heard, let me tell you now, babies do not come out knowing how to breastfeed.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding Is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do It Anyway
If nursing were easy, there wouldn't be so many helpful products.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding Is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do it Anyway
Though breastfeeding is supposed to the most natural thing ever, it seems like a rich-people sport for all the stuff we buy to help.
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding Is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do It Anyway
Successful breastfeeding take courage, resilience, patience, and support and it always has. If your partner or support group hasn't piled on the accolades for your heroism, then let them know you will expect oohs and has when you make it through the first two to three months (no matter how you got there) and your baby is happy and healthy -- because you are awesome!
— Cassi Clark, Breastfeeding Is a Bitch: But We Lovingly Do it Anyway
I see my mother exactly as she is – sad and strong, tense and trying.
— Corey Ann Haydu, The Careful Undressing of Love
No place in this world is, as safe as my mother’s womb,And nobody in this world is, as loving as my mother.
— Luffina Lourduraj
When Aziza first spotted Mariam in the morning, her eyes always sprang open, and she began mewling and squirming in her mother's grip. She thrust her arms toward Mariam, demanding to be held, her tiny hands opening and closing urgently, on her face a look of both adoration and quivering anxiety. "What a scene you're making," Laila would say, releasing her to crawl toward Mariam. "What a scene! Calm down. Khala Mariam isn't going anywhere. There she is, your aunt. See? Go on, now." As soon as she was in Mariam's arms, Aziza's thumb shot into her mouth and she buried her face in Mariam's neck. Mariam bounced her stiffly, a half-bewildered, half-grateful smile on her lips. Mariam had never before been wanted like this. Love had never been declared to her so guilelessly, so unreservedly.Aziza made Mariam want to weep."Why have you pinned your little heart to an old, ugly hag like me?" Mariam would murmur into Aziza's hair. "Huh? I am nobody, don't you see? A dehati. What have I got to give you?"But Aziza only muttered contentedly and dug her face in deeper. And when she did that, Mariam swooned. Her eyes watered. Her heart took flight. And she marvelled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
This thing, growing inside and filling her breasts with promise, this thing was the same as her. It matched her better than anything or anyone she'd known.
— Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy
Mothers' bodies are not their own. The happiest ones seem to have forgotten what it is like to want themselves back at all.
— Lisa Carey, The Stolen Child
On becoming a mother, I had forever left that solitary state of girlhood behind, and if I sometimes pined to be alone with Augustine as we used to be in our first love, a quick glance at my sleeping son's face soon banished such foolish thoughts. It was as if Augustine and I had been in a beautiful bubble but when my body split open in childbirth, the shimmering membrane broke and we were delivered to the world.
— Suzanne M. Wolfe, The Confessions of X
Know the rules of child rearing!!Rule one: Physical strength!Rule two: Physical strength!There are no rules three or four, but rule five is physical strength!
— Kaoru Mori, A Bride's Story, Vol. 4
People say all the time that they’d do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don’t know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don’t think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It’s something the child has to learn.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother’s deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn’t tell, or told stories that weren’t entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form.
— Pamela Erens, Eleven Hours
Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.
— Anaïs Nin
Polly was all too aware that much of her time on holiday would be spent doing the laundry and the cooking and the child-care and all the other chores that back in London would be shared with her cleaning lady. A holiday with Theo and the children represented two weeks of domestic and maternal drudgery.
— Amanda Craig, A Vicious Circle
-she loved Lily Cate like her own, and for this night, this moment, she would be her mother, even though there was no guarantee of tomorrow.
— Laura Frantz, The Mistress of Tall Acre
You are lucky, Renisenb. You have found the happiness that is inside everybody's own heart. To most women, happiness means coming and going, busied over small affairs. It is care for one's children and laughter and conversation and quarrels with other women and alternate love and anger with a man. It is made up of small things strung together like beads on a string.
— Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End
When I tried to meet some impossible standard for motherhood, tried to earn my way to a weird sort of Proverbs 31 Woman Club, I collapsed in exhaustion and simmering anger, sadness, and failure. This was not life in the Vine, this exhausting job description; this was not the Kingdom of God, let alone a redeemed woman living full. This was the shell of someone trying to measure up, trying to earn through her mothering what God had already freely given. This was someone feeling the weight of unmet expectations from the Church and her own self and the world all at once.
— Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women
Being a mother brings us face-to-face with ourselves as children, with our mothers as human beings, with our darkest fears of who we really are.
— Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person
Real women have children, wise women choose for themselves.
— Karin Rahbek, Do I Have To Be A Mother?: A Childfree Woman's Struggle with Doubt and Loneliness
His manners are old-fashioned, the work of a vigilant mother.
— Rumaan Alam, Rich and Pretty
Preston doesn't do well with trouble. But that's why I'm here. That's why my name is Mommy.
— Sadeqa Johnson, Second House from the Corner
At first I had not understood Mama. But as I grew older, maybe not wiser, certainly more realistic, I realized she did the best she could. She loved me, in her own way. Not everyone is born to be a mother. It does not come naturally to some women.
— Christie Watson, Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away
Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering. Many women have no gift for it. They mimic the recalled gestures and mannerisms of the women they’ve been trained to become and hope for the best.
— Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
The day you call someone "Mother" is the day your pain is hers to bear, you burden hers to carry.
— Sunanda J. Chatterjee
This body. This body Dan wanted to possess, and together they made a baby, asleep right now in the very next room. She tells herself that he's alive, that he's well, though some instinct in her tells her, every so often, that the baby is dead, that she needs to rush to his side. Either this will pass, or it never will. This is motherhood.
— Rumaan Alam, Rich and Pretty