Quotes about mother
page 10

“When you have a good mother and no father, God kind of sits in. It's not enough, but it helps.”

Dick Gregory (1932–2017) American comedian, social activist, social critic, writer, and entrepreneur

Nigger: An Autobiography (1964)

God, Help

“If my mother gets help from it, then I will enter politics.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

On being pressured to join politics to help his mother, quoted by Meena Agrawal, in "Rajiv Gandhi", p. 22.
Quote

Help

“Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards … in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on … How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Way, Personality

“And my father and mother strengthened me in this my first impression, saying in my presence, I was intended for some great purpose, which they had always thought from certain marks on my head and breast.”

Nat Turner (1800–1831) American slave rebellion leader

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)

“I esteem immensely the Mother of God, the ever chaste, immaculate Virgin Mary.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

God

“I had long believed that the Heath aberration of authoritarian centralist corporatism apart, most of the values, ethos and policies of Conservatism were strongly supported by working-class voters. Those voters—especially the socio-economic groups C1 and C2—I saw as natural Conservatives who nevertheless saw themselves for tribal reasons as Labour voters. However much we tried to reach them by argument, we always failed because they were unable to identify themselves with the representatives of the Tory Party they saw. I was determined to be a Conservative who spoke their language, not just what is often described as my flat North-London accent—which was after all my mother tongue—but their practical realism, lack of humbug and strong attachment to many traditional standards and values.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

Norman Tebbit, Upwardly Mobile (Futura, 1991), p. 172.

Support, Nature, Strong

“But your own vegetarianism, Mrs. Costello,” says President Garrard, pouring oil on troubled waters: “it comes out of moral conviction, does it not?”
“No, I don't think so,” says his mother. “It comes out of a desire to save my soul.”
Now there truly is a silence, broken only by the clink of plates as the waitresses set baked Alaskas before them.
“Well, I have a great respect for it,” says Garrard. “As a way of life.”
“I'm wearing leather shoes,” says his mother. “I'm carrying a leather purse. I wouldn't have overmuch respect if I were you.”
“Consistency,” murmurs Garrard. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Surely one can draw a distinction between eating meat and wearing leather.”

J.M. Coetzee book The Lives of Animals

“Degrees of obscenity,” she replies.
Source: The Lives of Animals (1999), pp. 43-44

Life, Shoe, Way, Soul

“The dynamics of the city. His mother had been scared of cities. It had been part of his education. She had told him cities are dangerous places. They're full of tough, scary guys. He was a tough boy himself but he had walked around as a teenager ready and willing to believe her. And he had seen that she was right. People on city streets were fearful and furtive and defensive. They kept their distance and crossed to the opposite sidewalk to avoid coming near him. They made it so obvious he became convinced the scary guys were always right behind him, at his shoulder. Then he suddenly realized no, I'm the scary guy. They're scared of me. It was a revelation. He saw himself reflected in store windows and understood how it could happen. He had stopped growing at fifteen when he was already six feet five and two hundred and twenty pounds. A giant. Like most teenagers in those days he was dressed like a bum. The caution his mother had drummed into him was showing up in his face as a blank-eyed, impassive stare. They're scared of me. It amused him and he smiled and then people stayed even farther away. From that point onward he knew cities were just the same as every other place, and for every city person he needed to be scared of there were nine hundred and ninety-nine others a lot more scared of him. He used the knowledge like a tactic, and the calm confidence it put in his walk and his gaze redoubled the effect he had on people. The dynamics of the city.”

Lee Child book Running Blind

Source: Running Blind (2000), Ch. 1.

People, Education, Fear, Smile

“I think what he went through as a child was very heavy. He never got over his mother leaving his father, and following her mother to Florida, to an area that was very different, and losing his father. When he was seven years old, this was a very sensitive boy, who was wide-eyed and trusting, and not knowing how to protect himself at all.”

Sandra Seacat (1936) American acting teacher and actress

As heard in the "Mickey Rourke" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_KOo2uaH3E installment of The Dark Side of Fame with Piers Morgan, broadcast October 6, 2008.

Boy, Thinking

“In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.”

Richard Ford (1944) American novelist and short story writer

Source: Wildlife (1990), p. 1

Love, Time

“I'm finished crying for Casey. I'm crying for all the other mothers.”

Cindy Sheehan (1957) American antiwar activist

while visiting http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=ARCHIVES&ID=564506446079852571&ARCHIVES=true her son's cross at the Arlington West memorial in Santa Barbara, California, on Mother's Day, May 7, 2004 2004

Cry

“To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Ian Hacking (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 7.

Way, Question, Sense

“WHEN father bought the lamp, or a little before that, he said to mother:
"Hark ye, mother—ought n't we to buy us a lamp?"
"A lamp? What sort of a lamp?"
"What! Don't you know that the storekeeper who lives in the market town has brought from St. Petersburg lamps that actually burn better than ten päreä? [1] They've already got a lamp of the sort at the parsonage."
"Oh, yes! Is n't it one of those things which shines in the middle of the room so that we can see to read in every corner, just as if it was broad daylight?"
"That's just it. There's oil that burns in it, and you only have to light it of an evening, and it burns on without going out till the next morning."
"But how can the wet oil burn?"”

Juhani Aho (1861–1921) Finnish author and journalist

"You might as well ask—how can brandy burn?" Juhani Aho. " When Father Brought Home the Lamp https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Stories_by_Foreign_Authors_(Scandinavian)/When_Father_Brought_Home_the_Lamp," Translated by R. Nisbet Bain. in: Stories by Foreign Authors–Scandinavian, Cassell Publishing Co. 1898.

Light, Reading

“She's more even -[daughter China] - I think it jumps generations. You get a screwball in one, and then the next one is straight, then you get a screwball. My grandmother was goofy, my mother was straight.”

Grace Slick (1939) American musician, writer and painter

Speaking on the Joan Rivers Show, 1990

Thinking, Daughters

“…I had no love for politics. I treasured the privacy of my family life. My mother respected both these sentiments. Then my brother, Sanjay was killed in the prime of his life. It broke a mother’s heart. It did not break a Prime Minister’s will. Without even a day’s break, she carried on her noble task single-minded in fulfilling her pledge to her people
There is a loneliness that only a bereaved mother can know…she called to me in her loneliness. I went to her side. At her instance, I left my love for flying at her instance I joined her as a political aide. From her I learned my first political lessons. It was she who urged me to respond to the insistent demand from the constituency and the part to take my brother’s place as Member of Parliament for Amethi. With her blessings I was made General Secretary of my party asking me to accept the challenge of stepping into her shoes.
In accepting this challenge I fulfilled a national duty and a filial duty of a son to a mother.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

In Memorable Quotes from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhi (2009) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=L5bTCgLM1lYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false, Quote 37 Quote

Love, Life, People, Family

“How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

Life, Communication, Solitude, Tear

“Mother told me to be something so I'm afraid enough to stay wide awake”

Matthew Good (1971) Canadian singer-songwriter

Musical Works, Beautiful Midnight, Failing the Rorschach Test

“I have been strongly influenced by the Mahabharata, discourses of the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo and Plato. My masters have been Vyasa, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo, as elucidated by Ram Swarup. … Paganism was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived though-categories constructed by Christianity’s city-based manipulators of human minds. In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous culture of the world – Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native American. It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan. The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term 'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create confusion. I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'…
I met her [Mother Theresa] briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown. I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill, when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in the drawing room. Teresa told her, "He is not your real father. Your real father is in heaven." The girl said, "He is very ill." Theresa commented, "If he dies, your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never 'dies."”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

The girl was in tears. Interview, The Observer. Date : February 22, 1997. http://sathyavaadi.tripod.com/truthisgod/Articles/goel.htm https://egregores.blogspot.com/2009/10/buddha-sri-aurobindo-and-plato.html https://egregores.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/hindus-and-pagans-a-return-to-the-time-of-the-gods/

Money, People, World, Art

“QUESTION: Is there a reason for the pen name? One you’d be willing to share, I suppose. As in, is it because you’re actually a secret CIA agent and/or Russian spy, or merely because you don’t ever want your mother knowing what you’ve written?
JTH: My mother and the rest of my family don’t know that I have written the novels. Those people I know who aren’t close friends see me as a failure by the American standards of success. Being a “failure” in such a way has been a continual lesson. It’s helped me realize that we make quick judgments of others based on little real information. We assume so much – but don’t know the secrets held within the heart.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

From Interviews

People, Secret, Family, Way

“A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is then that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract. She invoked the Love Laws.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Source: The God of Small Things, p. 233.

Love, Law, Travel, Kiss

“My mother wore these in a relaxed, family context. It was a more informal side which of course had no reason to be seen or shown in other exhibitions.”

Caroline, Princess of Hanover (1957) Princess of Monaco

Family

“Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Karna looking up to Kunti asked her, in: p. 232.
The God of Small Things

“To this day we cannot enjoy the blessing brought to us in Christ without thinking at the same time of that which God gave as adornment and honour to Mary, in willing her to be the mother of his only-begotten Son.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

New Testament Commentaries, John 1.32; as quoted in Thomas F. Torrance, "A Harmony of Matthew, Mark and Luke” https://books.google.com/books/about/A_harmony_of_the_Gospels_Matthew_Mark_an.html?id=0diPvgAACAAJ (St. Andrew's Press, Edinburgh, 1972), p.32. and "The Gospel of St. John: The Story of the Son of God" https://books.google.com/books?isbn=113704120X St John Variant: And at this day, the blessedness brought to us by Christ cannot be the subject of our praise, without reminding us, at the same time, of the distinguished honor which God was pleased to bestow on Mary, in making her the mother of his Only Begotten Son.

God, Thinking, Time, Christ

“I think, How clever time works, overlapping people's lives at certain stages, and as some eyes are waking up, others are already closing, securing the continuity of the world. My mother and I were connected for twelve years. She also lived during a time I didn't exist. And I, in turn, must now keep living when she does not. And yet my father, who still shares the same wheel of time, is more like my parallel line.”

Rigoberto González (1970) American writer

Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (2006)

People, World, Thinking, Time

“Ah new people, haughty beyond measure, irreverent to so great a mother!”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Canzone 53, st. 6
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

People

“The history of human development can neatly be divided into two epochs: (1) the feminine, yin, agro-sedentary pastoral idyll of the old-to-late Paleolithic Mother-Earth-Goddess religions and (2) the masculine, yang, technomobile hunter-gatherer-warrior field effect of urbanized, late-Neolithic-to-Modern Father-Sky-God religions.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Appendix (p. 527)
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004)

God, Religion, History

“Of two men sharing with a calf the milk of that calf's mother one eyes the calf with the thought that his tender flesh would provide good meat for him and his friends to feast upon at his approaching birthday. The other thinks of the calf as his brother of the teat and is filled with affection for the young beast and his mother. I say to you, the latter is truly nourished by that calf's meat; while the first is poisoned thereby. Aye, many things are put in the belly that should be put in the heart.”

Mikha'il Na'ima book The Book of Mirdad

The Book of Mirdad (1948)

Men, Birthday, Thinking, Heart

“I had perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to stablish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text.”

William Tyndale (1494–1536) Bible translator and agitator from England

Preface to The Pentateuch (1530) http://www.bible-researcher.com/tyndale2.html

People, Truth

“There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Life, Death, Children, World

“My mother took too much, a great deal too much, care of me; she over-educated, over-instructed, over-dosed me with premature lessons of prudence: she was so afraid that I should ever do a foolish thing, or not say a wise one, that she prompted my every word, and guided my every action. So I grew up, seeing with her eyes, hearing with her ears, and judging with her understanding, till, at length, it was found out that I had not eyes, ears or understanding of my own.”

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) Irish writer

Vivian (1812), ch. 1; Tales and Novels, vol. 8, p. 8.

Education, Understanding

“The matter was still "Top Secret" and the subject of cabinet debates at the time of the Scranton Riot. Don't ask me why it was top secret, or even restricted; our government has gotten the habit of classifying anything as secret which the all-wise statesmen and bureaucrats decide we are not big enough boys and girls to know, a Mother-Knows-Best-Dear policy. I've read that there used to be a time when a taxpayer could demand the facts on anything and get them. I don't know; it sounds Utopian.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Puppet Masters

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 24 (p. 127)

Secret, Girl, Boy, Time

““God, please make me a channel of your peace.” The first line of the St. Francis prayer, popularized by Mother Teresa, bastardized by Margaret Thatcher, and cherished by those of us who have fallen through the cracks and floated ourselves back up with crack.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

God, Peace

“My mother was a popular folk singer. I grew up listening to her songs and know the lyrics and tunes by heart. Although she wanted me to become a singer, I chose a career in the aviation industry. I have come back after more than 10 years to fulfil her dream.”

Navneet Aditya Waiba Nepali folk singer

https://web.archive.org/web/20170202035251/https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170126/jsp/siliguri/story_132419.jsp

Dreams, Heart

“Our mother is coming home and we are so grateful and so thankful that this is happening.”

Yolanda King (1955–2007) American actress

On her mother being released from the hospital (23 September 2005) http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1454&dat=20050923&id=RgtPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=th8EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6922,1920770 2000s

Home

“O'er the fields of space together following her flying traces,
In a radiant tumult thronging, suns and stars and myriad races
Mount the spirit spires of beauty, reaching onward to the day
When the Shepherd of the Ages draws his misty hordes away
Through the glimmering deeps to silence, and within the awful fold
Life and joy and love forever vanish as a tale is told,
Lost within the mother's being. So the vision flamed and fled,
And before the glory fallen every other dream lay dead.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Love, Life, Age, Beauty

“I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak."
I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up.
I came too late to help my mother to her feet.
By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again.”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

"Many Rivers To Cross" (1981)

Women, Truth, Way, Courage

“We support the right of women to choose our own lives for ourselves. If women wish to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists, politicians, we should have the same opportunities as men, more and more we do…But many women wish to devote themselves mainly to raising a family and running a home. And we should have that choice too. Very few jobs can compare in long-term importance and satisfaction with that of housewife and mother. For the family is the building block of society. It is a nursery, a school, a hospital, a leisure place, a place of refuge and a place of rest. It encompasses the whole of society. It fashions our beliefs. It is the preparation for the rest of our life. And women run it.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Women's Conference (25 May 1988) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107248 Third term as Prime Minister

Life, Women, Men, School

“My interest was dance and, in the beginning, I didn't enjoy acting at all. It was my mother who brought me into films and who looked after my career. I remember each time a producer came to meet her, my only reaction was, 'Oh God, another year of my life gone.”

Hema Malini (1948) Indian actress, dancer and politician

Hema Malini : Quotes, 6 December 2013, Internet Media Data Base http://m.imdb.com/name/nm0004564/quotes,

Life, God, Time, Dance

“As for the woman styling herself Mother Teresa, I can attest that until I wrote my little pamphlet, she had been the recipient, the beneficiary, of a twenty-five year Niagra of one-hundred percent favorable publicity in every secular, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic, or non-religious outlet of any kind at all in the media. Only by the grace of my intervention [laughter] could it not be said, when she died, that no one had ever said a single word against her; and that no one had ever pointed out that she had fawned on the Duvalier family in Haiti and said that they were the Lord's anointed and beloved of the poor.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2000, "Hostility Of America to Religion" (2000)

Family, Laughter

“Yet you would not drive a car with your mouth unless you are my mother-in-law.”

Jean-Louis Gassée (1944) French businessman

NetWorker, November/December 1996
Commenting on the gestures vs. speech debate in computing.

Law, Cars

“Her mother’s humpf mixed contempt with frustration. “You just don’t understand anything, do you? We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world’s evils, only to find we’ve raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!””

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 115)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Children, Stupidity, World, Understanding

“For the traditionalists the Enlightenment boiled down to a fatal misunderstanding. All philosophes had been wrong about the nature and also, if one could put it that way, about the sex of prejudice. They had mistaken an earth mother who sustained and inspired her children for a bogeyman of a father. Then, seeking to overthrow this father, they had in reality done away with the mother-figure.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), p. 26.

Children, Sex, Way, Nature

“I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.”

Amy Hempel (1951) Short story writer

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempe, (2006)

Imagination, Drink, Thinking, Animals

“We can be sure our beloved pope is standing today at the window of the father's house, that he sees us and blesses us. Yes, bless us, Holy Father. We entrust your dear soul to the Mother of God, your Mother, who guided you each day and who will now guide you to the glory of her son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time (full) of joyful hope and profound gratitude.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Homily during the Requiem Mass of the funeral of [Pope John Paul II], on April 8, 2005
2005

God, Sadness, Hope, Soul

“Finally.... I will have finished the paintings for my uncle. I have completely reworked them since my last letter [to his mother, 5 May 1865]; originally I had included a mass of details, which, from the distance they were intended to be viewed, had a very bad effect. I have worked at breakneck speed for two weeks, and now I am rather pleased, at least with one of them.”

Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) French painter

Quote from Bazille's letter to his mother, c. 18/25 August, 1865; as cited in Impressionnism, Gary Tinterow, Henri Loyrette; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994, p. 329
1861 - 1865

Painting, Speed

“I didn’t come from a background that had any idea about what contemporary art was, it was not anti or pro, it had nothing to do with it. I do remember something my mother said when I was sixteen. I was going off to college, and I said, “I think I’m going to be an artist, not a professor of philosophy.” They all assumed I would be a professor because I’m good at logic, and she looked at me and she said, “Lawrence, you’ll break your heart.” And I said, “Why?””

Lawrence Weiner (1942) American artist

And she said, “Art is for rich people and women.” Lawrence Weiner in: Thessaly La Force, " STUDIO VISIT Lawrence Weiner http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/02/14/lawrence-weiner/," at theparisreview.org/blog, February 14, 2011.

Women, People, Art, Idea

“The importance of imitation for the development of higher cognition in human beings: We embody ideas before we abstract them out and then represent them in an articulated way. What is the child doing when they play house? They are watching their parent over multiple instantiations, and then abstracting out the spirit called Mother, and that is whatever is mother-like across all those multiple manifestations, and then laying out that pattern internally and manifesting it in an abstract world. It's that you're smart enough to pull out the abstraction, and then embody it. And certainly the child is striving toward an ideal. If children don't engage in that kind of dramatic and pretend play to some tremendous degree, then they don't get properly socialized. It's really a critical element of developing self understanding and of also developing the capability of being with others, because what you do when you're a child, especially around the age of four is: you jointly construct a shared fictional world, and then you act out your joint roles within that shared fictional world. Embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged. How else could it be? Clearly we were mostly bodies before we were minds. Clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GPAl_q2QQ "Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority"

Children, Age, World, Way

“The world increasingly allows girls to be whoever they wish to be-- homemaker, mother, secretary, executive.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 167.

World, Girl

“Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 18

“I acknowledge the Roman Church to be our mother church, although defiled with some infirmities and corruptions…Let [the Papists] assure themselves, that, as I am a friend of their persons, if they be good subjects, so am I a vowed enemy, and do denounce mortal war to their errors.”

James I of England (1566–1625) king during union of English and Scottish crowns

On Roman Catholics, at the opening of parliament in 1604.[citation needed]

War, Error, Personality

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J. D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

"Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way", Girl With Curious Hair
Short stories

Love, Dogs, Feeling, Fashion

“My life began when my grandmother decided to take hers, when I found out that my mother's whole family did the same thing [told bij het grandfather c. 1941], when I found out that I am the only one surviving, and when I felt the same inclination deep inside of me, craving for despair and death.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Quote in Charlotte's letter, to her father, c. 1941-43; as cited in 'Life in Pictures Charlotte Salomon and her art beyond life tragedies' https://arthive.com/publications/2850~Life_in_Pictures_Charlotte_Salomon_and_her_art_beyond_life_tragedies, on Art-smart Charlotte wrote her father from South-France, about the events with her grandparents where she stayed. Then she took up her brush with the intention to realize an ambitious plan of creating an autobiographical novel in pictures.

Life, Death, Family, Despair

“I… chose rather to publish… in puris Naturalibus, or as they were produced as first, than be at the Trouble of reducing them into any other Form… I could not bear the Pains of reading over again a great Part of these Things; either from my being tired with them, or not caring to undergo the Pains and Study in new modelling them. But I have done in this as weakly Mothers, who give up their Offspring to the Care of their Friends, either to Nurse and bring up, or abandon to the wide World. One of which is Mr. Isaac Newton, my Collegue, a Man of great Learning and Sagacity, who revised my Copy and noted such Things as wanted Correction, and even gave me some of his own, which you will see here and there interspersed with mine, not without their due Commendations. The other is Mr. John Collins (who may be deservedly called the Mersennas of our Nation, Born to promote this Science, both with his own Labours, and those of others. Who with much Trouble took care of the Edition.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Preface
Geometrical Lectures (1735)

Pain, World, Study, Learning

“My mother came to a Smashing Pumpkins gig once, and I was wearing a dress. She was very upset. She said, 'Everyone's gonna think you're a fag.' I said,'Well, they already think I'm an asshole.”

Billy Corgan (1967) American musician, songwriter, producer, and author

Rolling Stone. 23 January 1997.

Thinking

“[Fred] Spoor's observations are truly startling, In all species of the genus Homo, the inner ear structure is indistinguishable from that of modern humans. Similarly, in all species of Australopithecus, the semicircular canals look like those of apes. Does this mean that the australopithecines moved about as apes do—that is, quadrupedally? The structure of the pelvis and lower limbs speaks against this conclusion. So does a remarkable discovery my mother made in 1976: a trail of very humanlike footprints made in a layer of volcanic ash some 3.75 million years ago.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

War, People, Mountain, Star

“They came three thousand miles, and died,
To keep the Past upon its throne;
Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,
Their English mother made her moan.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Graves of Two English Soldiers on Concord Battleground, st. 3 (1849)

Past

“Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision. Birth control is woman's problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to live.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 8, "Birth Control; A Parents' Problem or Woman's?"

Death, Children, World, Way

“The common growth of Mother Earth
Suffices me,—her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.”

William Wordsworth Peter Bell

Prologue, stanza 27.
Peter Bell (1798)

Tear

“An attic’s the afterlife of a house,” said Otille, opening the door. “Or so my mother used to say.”

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Source: Green Eyes (1984), Chapter 15, p. 201

Housing

“Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn't really an authority. Neither the Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 6

Art, Literature, Time

“The most important job we have is not congressman or senator or governor. It's family and mother and husband and wife.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

'Faith and Freedom' fundraiser event in Anderson, South Carolina , quoted in * 2014-8-25
2014-08-29
In South Carolina, Rubio heals wounds on the right
Peter
Hamby
CNN
2010s, 2014
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/26/politics/rubio-sc-fundraiser/index.html?hpt=po_t1

Family

“I forgive you mother; I can hear you
And I long to be near you
But every road leads to an end”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"Death With Dignity"
Lyrics, Carrie and Lowell (2015)

Forgiveness

“Her mother called to her. She said, "Where are you going, Flora Belle?"
Flora didn't answer her. She never answered her mother when she called her Flora Belle.
Sometimes she didn't answer her mother when she called her Flora either.”

Kate DiCamillo book Flora & Ulysses

Source: Flora & Ulysses (2013), Chapter Four: A Surprisingly Helpful Cynic, p. 12

“There's no way to repay a mother's love, or lack of it.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Love, Way

“She [Isa's mother] called up Lufthansa and said, 'I have this daughter, you see, and she needs airplane windows,' she said. That's how she did it.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

Isa Genzken's mother, who was in her 90s, helped her in obtaining a section of jetliner window panels for an artwork Isa wanted to make: a series of cut-out airplane windows
after 2010, No, It Isn't Supposed to Be Easy' (2013)

Daughters

“Whenever I came across something that influenced me, I wanted to be that. So it varied from an astronaut, airhostess, army girl, to truck driver. Once, I wanted to be a nun - my mother wanted me to change schools after that…”

Preity Zinta (1975) film actress

Famous quotes

School, Girl, Change

“Divinity is not proved by having one parent instead of two. It could be argued that such a person is removed from us and could not have been truly man. As to sinlessness, we men are a wicked lot, but all the evil in our children does not come from us. Mothers can pass on evil as well as fathers, and sinlessness cannot be physically determined.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.99

Men, Children, Parent, Evil

“Every country-side wished to have its own Ku Klux, founded in secrecy and mystery like the mother ‘Den’ at Pulaski, until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an ‘Invisible Empire of the South,’ bound together in loose organization to protect the southern country from some of the ugliness hazards of a time of revolution.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Source: 1900s, A History of the American People, Vol. 9 (1902), p. 60

Time, Country

“I confidently expect that we shall continue to be grouped with mothers-in-law and Wigan Pier as one of the recognized objects of ridicule.”

Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges (1892–1969) British civil servant

On the civil service, in Portrait of a Profession: The Civil Service Tradition (1950)

Law, Confidence

“My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality—it exhibits the usual “coruscating wit” and “penetrating social observation”—but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Author”, opening; p. 45.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Children, Books

“While I was playing WoW after dinner at mother’s house once, I heard my sister watching the new show Avatar: The Last Airbender on the television. I decided to check it out. I soon found myself really enjoying it. It was a magnificent story set in a fantasy world where people can control the power of the elements. Once I watched the first episode, I was hooked on the story. Prince Zuko was my favorite character; he was a banished prince who was trying to regain his rightful place in the world. I always related to him. Avatar: The Last Airbender became my favorite T. V. show.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Pastimes

People, World, Sister, Housing

“Mothers always sacrifice and wastes her life for their children. that's why I ask her to participate even more than youth.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi asking Egyptian women to go vote on the referendum during a cultural symposium organized by MOD Department of Moral Affairs on 11 January 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w50oWry07E. 2014

Life, Children, Youth

“Many women from Hindu rulers’ families were forcibly married by Muslim kings throughout the medieval period and yet only Shams Siraj Afif narrates in detail of the marriage of Firoz Shah’s mother to Malik Rajjab, a cousin of the king, and emperor Jahangir tells how he demanded daughters of Hindu kings.”

K. S. Lal (1920–2002) Indian historian

Source: Muslim Slave System in Medieval India (1994), Chapter 12

Women, Marriage, Family, Daughters

“And you mother still close to me,
you know that it is not enough to live an ordered and honest life.
You have been faithful for years to bring order into our house.
As soon as the dawn appeared in the night sky,
you rose towards the tasks awaiting you –
in the silence of a mental prayer.
Perhaps it is not enough even the overwhelming love,
to which you gave the sober expression of concrete acts.
The sacred wool, the steaming milk and the bed
composed with inimitable care by your hands.
Going back in time you recounted to your children their births,
and the birthdays have slowly vanished.
The beginning is now found from a thousand beginnings,
with the ancient, with the unknown, with Christ.
A present act includes them all,
opening after the events have passed.
And there is a severe duty for struggle,
something in our own life could be wrenched away by it.
The guards will soon appear,
and they will take me to my cell with the high window.
You will still be with me,
as mother and inexhaustible human presence.
Giving freely of your love, you still knew that your son is freedom.
You were a nearness, that always found something to do.
I have watched you unflinching under hardness and spite,
always moving, and acting,
holding back your inner rebellion you had pity on rage.
Now we are together to work and open all around.
In the loving gift to the world which ever crucifies us
is our fulfilment.
Seeing its limitations, still to treasure everything
is the gesture of infinite miracle,
and you were right: order comes from this principle,
the earthly goods, as our brothers the prophets tell us,
will be given unto us.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Love, Life, Children, World

“Philip's mother had been a Lyncestian noblewoman" - "rebellious kings of Lyncestis who traced their origins to the notorious Bacchiad kings of Greek Corinth.”

Robin Lane Fox (1946) Historian, educator, writer, gardener

Source: Alexander the Great, 1973, p.32

“He was caught up in a lie he half-believed,
Found her hiding high in the family tree.
Washed his hands, and put her 'cross his knee.
She said "daddy, you've been a mother to me."”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Ankle Deep
Lyrics, Highway Companion (2006)

Lie, Family, Tree

“What good is it having God for a mother if she never sends you a birthday card?”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 3 (p. 50)

God, Birthday

“Pythagoras being asked how a man ought to conduct himself towards his country, when it had acted iniquitously with respect to him, replied, as to a mother.”

Stobaeus Ancient Greek anthologist

40
Pythagorean Ethical Sentences

Country

“The goalkeeper always deserves the credit. But not this time. The way I kicked the ball, even my mother would have saved it.”

Romário (1966) Brazilian association football player

After missing a penalty kick, in 2005.
Source: esportes.terra.

Way, Time

“I kept a diary during our White House years, and I have drawn upon it often in this book. I experience the world through my intuitions and feelings, and you’ll find out a lot about those in these pages.
My mother used to say, “Play the hand that’s dealt you,” and that is what I have always tried to do. And this, for better or worse, is how it seemed to me.”

Nancy Reagan book My Turn

Foreword
My Turn (1989)

Books, World, Feeling, Housing

“Adolf Hitler was the third son and the fourth of six children of Alois Hitler (born Schicklgruber) (1837–1903), a minor customs official, and Klara Pölzl (1860-1907), his second cousin, and third wife. Alois was born illegitimate and for the first thirty-nine years of his life bore his mother's name, Schicklgruber. The name Hitler appears in the maternal and paternal line. Both Hitler's grandmother on his mother's side and his grandfather on his father's side were named Hitler, or rather variants of it, for the family name was variously written as Hiedler, Huetler, Huettler and Hitler. Because Adolf's mother was his father's second cousin, an episcopal dispensation had to be obtained for the marriage.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Life, Marriage, Children, Family

“For the first book, I interviewed one mother of four little kids, skinny, pretty, bad teeth — meaning no dental care — and the kids are jumping around, 'cause they want to hear their mamma's voice played back… and so I play it back, and she listens to what she said on the tape and she says, 'Oh my God,' she says. ' I never knew I felt that way before' … That's pretty hot stuff, isn't it? That's hot stuff. That's the stuff.”

Studs Terkel (1912–2008) American author, historian and broadcaster

The Guardian interview (2002)

God, Books, Way

“Repitition is the mother of knowledge. To help our children retain God's Word, we repeated a verse six times with them, then gave them a reward (a candy bar) when they had memorized ten verses. I have calculated that we had around six thousand family devotions with our children. The three of them made it through their teenage years without an ounce of rebellion.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

God, Children, Family, Knowledge

“Yes, he loved his mother like no other,
His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother.
One thing on which you can depend is,
He sure knew who a boy's best friend is.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Oedipus Rex"
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)

Love, Boy, Sister, Dependency

“God reveals Himself to a devotee who feels drawn to Him by the combined force of these three attractions: the attraction of worldly possessions for the worldly man, the child's attraction for its mother, and the husband's attraction for the chaste wife. If one feels drawn to Him by the combined force of these three attractions, then through it one can attain Him.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 83

God, Feeling

“Oh dear, oh dear, how stupid men are when they get an idea into their heads! I tell you he's a good dragon, and a friend of mine, and tells me the most beautiful stories you ever heard, all about old times and when he was little. And he's been so kind to mother, and mother'd do anything for him. And father likes him too, though father doesn't hold with art and poetry much, and always falls asleep when the dragon starts talking about style. But the fact is, nobody can help liking him when once they know him. He's so engaging and so trustful, and as simple as a child!”

Kenneth Grahame book The Reluctant Dragon

The Boy to St. George
Dream Days (1898), The Reluctant Dragon

Men, Stupidity, Beauty, Art

“There's lots of law these days, but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she's the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything's upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?”

Dean Koontz book One Door Away from Heaven

Geneva Davis; chapter 60, p. 473
One Door Away from Heaven (2001)

Money, Children, People, Justice

“Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.”

Edna O'Brien (1930) Novelist, memoirist, biographer, playwright, poet and short story writer

Girls in their Married Bliss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964) p. 119

Women, God, Hate

“No mother, no father, no Sight.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: Old Kingdom series (The Abhorsen Trilogy), Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr (2001), p. 21.

“I will take the liberty of saying that we missed the chance we had in the 1990s. The question was posed: what kind of country should we have? A strong country, or a worthy one where people can live decently? We chose the former – a strong country. Once again we are living in an era of power. Russians are fighting Ukrainians. Their brothers. My father is Belarusian, my mother, Ukrainian. That's the way it is for many people. Russian planes are bombing Syria … A time full of hope has been replaced by a time of fear. The era has turned around and headed back in time. The time we live in now is second-hand … Sometimes I am not sure that I've finished writing the history of the "Red" man.”

Svetlana Alexievich (1948) Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer

Nobel Lecture (2015)

People, Fear, Hope, Way

“My beloved wife Peaches was adored by myself and her two sons. I shall bring them up with their mother in their hearts every day. We shall love her forever.”

Thomas Cohen (1990) British singer

As quoted in the Jewish Chronicle, 11 April 2014, p. 5

Love, Heart

“There are no children of whom we are fonder than those that are born of our brains, to whom we are father and mother in one.”

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654) French author, best known for his epistolary essays

Il n'y a point d'enfants que nous aimions davantage que ceux qui naissent de notre esprit, et desquels nous sommes père et mère tout ensemble.
Socrate Chrétien, Discours VI.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 67.
Socrate Chrétien (1662)

Children

“I must say that I am still passionately pro-life, I just have a much more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers.”

Shane Claiborne The Irresistible Revolution

Source: The Irresistible Revolution (2006), p. 44

Life, Birth, Sense, Passion

“There was never a more loyal woman in the South after we were forced by our political leaders to go to battle to defend our rights in ownership of African slaves, but they called it "States' Rights," and all I owned was invested in slaves and my people were loyal and I stood by them to the end. Like General Lee I could not fight against my kindred in a struggle that meant life or death to them. Nevertheless I am now too near the borderland of eternity to withhold my matured conscientious and honest opinion. If there had been no slaves there would have been no war. To fight for the perpetuation of domestic slavery was a mistake. The time had come in the United States to wipe out this evil. The South had to suffer, and even when our preachers were leading in prayer for victory, during the war, and black-robed mothers and wives were weeping for their dead ones, who perished on the field of battle, I had questions in my own mind as to what would be the end of it.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

From Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth Felton, p. 86 http://www.google.com/books?id=gHsLIvQ_BN0C&dq=rebecca+latimer+felton&printsec=frontcover&source=in#PPA86,M1.

Life, Death, War, People

“She envied Camille. Camille was a tramp, Mildred thought. And things were so much easier for a tramp. There was no conscience, no sense of loss, nothing but a wonderful, relaxed, stretching-cat selfishness. She could go to bed with anyone she wanted to and never see him again and have no feeling of loss or insecurity about it. That was the way Mildred thought it was with Camille. She wished she could be that way, and she knew she couldn't. Couldn't because of her mother. And the unbidden thought entered her mind—if her mother were only dead Mildred's life would be so much simpler. She could have a secret little place to live somewhere. Almost fiercely, she brushed the thought away. "What a foul thing to think," she said to herself ceremoniously. But it was a dream she often had.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 13. Mildred is the daughter of Elliot and Bernice Pritchard.

Life, Secret, Dreams, Way

“To man the earth seems altogether
No more a mother, but a step-dame rather.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

First Week, Third Day. Compare: "It is far from easy to determine whether she [Nature] has proved to him a kind parent or a merciless stepmother" Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book vii, Section 1.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

“In Vermont, at a state beach, a mother is reprimanded by Authority for allowing her 6 month old daughter to go about without her diapers on. Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing! If we [raise] children up like this it will probably ruin the whole pornography business, not to mention the large segment of the general economy which makes its money by playing on peoples sexual frustrations.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

1969 essay in the Freeman — as quoted in "You Might Very Well Be the Cause of Cancer": Read Bernie Sanders' 1970s-Era Essays http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-freeman-sexual-freedom-fluoride, by Tim Murphy, Mother Jones (6 July 2015) 1970s

Money, Children, People, Business

“Farrell’s other eleven defenses are The PMS Defense; The Husband Defense (Warren, I don’t quite know how to summarize this one—not sure I get it); The ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’ Defense, aka Learned Helplessness; ‘The Depressed Mother’ Defense; The ‘Mothers Don’t Kill’ Defense; The ‘Children Need Their Mother’ Defense; The ‘Blame-The-Father, Understand-The-Mother’ Defense; The ‘My Child, My Right To Abuse It’ Defense; The Plea Bargain Defense; The Svengali Defense; and The Contract Killing Defense.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, Chapter 12.

Children, Understanding, Learning

“Blizzards, floods, volcanos, hurricanes, earthquakes: They fascinate because they nakedly reveal that Mother Nature, afflicted with bipolar disorder, is as likely to snuff us as she is to succor us.”

Dean Koontz book The Taking

Part 1, Chapter 1
The Taking (2004)

Nature, Affliction

Quotes about mother page 10

Quotes about mother
page 10