Quotes about godmother (17 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

From article "In Defense of Curiosity" appearing in The Saturday Evening Post 208 (August 24, 1935); 8-9, 64-66. As cited in What I Hope to Leave Behind, The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt Edited by Alida M. Black, p 20.
As quoted in Todays Health (October 1966)

Birth , Thinking

“Patience is the mother of all virtues and the godmother of madness”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book Marina

Source: Marina

Patience , Madness

“The best thing about my faerie godmother is that the creepy just keeps on coming.”

Jim Butcher book Ghost Story

Source: Ghost Story

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Time

“Aren't fairy godmothers supposed to be nice and make you feel better about yourself?

… No, you're confusing fairy godmothers with sales clerks.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: My Fair Godmother

Feeling

“I'm a godmother, that's a great thing to be, a godmother. She calls me god for short, that's cute, I taught her that.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Ellen DeGeneres, My Point...And I Do Have One

God

“The key to happiness - as any good fairy godmother will tell you - is not to avoid problems, but to overcome them.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: My Unfair Godmother

Problem , Happiness

“If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources

People , Feeling , Intelligence , Universe

“In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.”

Edwin Lefèvre book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

Source: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923), Chapter XII, p. 149

Thinking

“(of names) Literary godfathers and godmothers, like those in real life, have much to answer for, on the score of the inappropriate.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Life

“An unfriendly fairy godmother presented him with a keen sense of humor. Nothing is more fatal in politics. --Colonel Edward M. House, adviser to President Woodrow Wilson.”

Thomas R. Marshall (1854–1925) American politician who served as the 28th Vice President of the United States

Charles M. Thomas, Thomas Riley Marshall, Hoosier Statesman (Oxford, OH:1939), p. 153.

Sense , Housing

“Her godmother, who was a fairy, said to her, "You want to go to the ball, don't you?"”

Charles Perrault (1628–1703) French author

Tales of Mother Goose, 1727, "Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper"

“Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;
it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

Shelley. In the Dublin Review (July 1908).

Love , Life , Death , World

“Every false philosophy is an imagination of a world propitious to irrational demands and unregulated desires. The false philosopher's dream infects someone in closer touch than himself with everyday experience, this agent of his desire seeks to translate the dream into reality, and disaster follows. It is the Cinderella story in actual life. Rousseau was Robespierre's fairy godmother, Karl Marx was Lenin's, Nietzsche was Hitler's.”

Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949) British writer and journalist

"Oscar Wilde's Fairy Godmother", The Best of Hugh Kingsmill (1973) p. 278 (1948)

Life , World , Dreams , Imagination

“I'm a — I'm a, um, a godmother which is just, that's fun to be a godmother, she is so precious, she's the light of my life, she's two… or five or something, and she's, uh… I don't know, I've never seen her — the pictures are precious, she just seems so, y'know… She lives clear across town, I don't have that kind of time, but, um… Well, I send money and stuff, it's not like I don't have a connection….”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Taste This

Life , Money , Light , Time

“[I]t takes a bad woman to be a good godmother.”

Billie Holiday (1915–1959) American jazz singer and songwriter

Remark made to Rosemary Clooney, circa summer 1956, regarding Holiday's qualifications to serve as godmother to Clooney's second child, as quoted by Clooney in "Profiles: The Heart, The Head, and The Pipes" http://www.rosemaryclooney.com/_1libraryfiles/newyorker8392.html by Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker (August 3, 1992). "Just before she left, I asked her if she would like to be the godmother of my second child, Maria, who was about to be born, and she said yes, that it takes a bad woman to be a good godmother. It was the last time I saw her."

“What I have against religion is that they start you when you are so defenseless. I mean, I was three when they started pumping this bullshit into my head. I believed in Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother, of course I believed in a virgin birth, and a guy lived in a whale, and a woman came from a rib. But then something happened that made me doubt all of it: I graduated sixth grade!”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Victory Begins at Home (20 January 2004)

Religion , Guy , Birth