“Mother, There is No Other. Like Mother So treat Her right, treat Her right.”

“Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.”

“No woman in the world, certainly none in America, has had to battle for her virtue, for her self-respect, for her right to her own children, as has the black mother.”

“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”

“She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.”

“You can always tell how a man will treat his wife by the way he treats his mother.”

“If you treat people right they will treat you right — ninety percent of the time.”

“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.”

“Outside Palestine the ancient East treated women as slaves without rights… in the fourth commandment, Thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother, the mother is set upon the same level as the father in the eyes of the children. Such reverence for women was not revealed by oriental 'flesh and blood.”

“What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult.”