“But not in my family. My mother and father (with immigrant pragmatism) assumed the American tongue would reinvent their children. Just so did several immigrant Hispanic mothers in Southern California recently remark their children’s reluctance to join America. These mothers feared their children were not swimming in the American current—not in the swifts and not in the depths; not even in the pop. They blamed “bilingual education,” a leaky boat theorem ostensibly designed to sink into the American current. (In fact, the theorem became a bureacracy preoccupied with prolonging itself.) These few mothers organized an opposition to bilingual education and eventually they sank the Armada in California. Theirs was an American impulse: to engage the American flow directly and to let their children be taken by it.”

“For children, father is a luxurious item, - just like beans for the horse…. but mother is everything for the child. The child cannot bear separation from his mother even for a minute.”

“The children of the white families in town were not permitted to associate with me, because my father was committing the then unpardonable crime, in Southern eyes, of educating negroes.”

“I am a mother and mothers don’t have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.”

“My father was frightened of his mother. I was frightened of my father and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.”

“The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

“What she did have, after raising two children, was the equivalent of a PhD in mothering and my undying respect.”

“My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.”

“Bertha: Did your mother have any children that lived?”

“Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are therir own”