Quotes about mother
page 19

“How vastly important is it, then, for mothers to have a higher regard for their duties—to feel deeply the immense responsibilities that rest upon them! It is through their ministrations that the world grows worse or better.”

Timothy Shay Arthur (1809–1885) Novelist, short story writer, publisher

The Mother’s Rule; or, The Right Way and the Wrong Way (1856), Preface

World, Feeling

“The Prophet said, "(It happens that) I start the prayer intending to prolong it, but on hearing the cries of a child, I shorten the prayer because I know that the cries of the child will incite its mother’s passions."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Al-Bukhari [citation needed]
Sunni Hadith

Passion

“Former Prime minister Tage Erlander spoke on radio a year ago about the people's home and about how he visited his senile mother at a residential hospital outside of Karlstad. When he came to visit her she told him; I'm so happy here. Everyone is so nice to me and I get good care and nice food. But who is paying for all this? Is it you Tage? And Erlander said; no I'm not paying, you're paying for this yourself mother. You have paid for this your entire life. You have grown up in this society, you have taken care of the family all these years, you have been a good citizen. And you have the right to be taken care of when you get old and infirm, not because of charity, not because you have a thick wallet, but because you are a Swedish citizen. This is your society, our society. You have the same right to this as anyone else. That is the welfare state and it is our greatest pride!”

Olof Palme (1927–1986) Swedish 20th century prime minister

Olof Palme, August 28, 1985, in debate with the leader of the opposition before 1985 years general election.

Life, Happiness, People, Family

“If you reject family - which a mother holds together - as well as the ties of Church and State, is there anything left for you?”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)

Family

“Servant: My lord! My lord, the Queen has just ridden into the bailey!
John: That cannot be! My mother is in Normandy.
Servant: No, my lord, she's in the great hall.
Eleanor: You both are wrong. I'm out in the stairwell.”

Sharon Kay Penman book Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons (1985), Book 1

“I wish [my mother] could have seen the America we’re going to build together. An America, where if you do your part, you reap the rewards. Where we don’t leave anyone out, or anyone behind. An America where a father can tell his daughter: yes, you can be anything you want to be. Even President of the United States.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Campaign kickoff speech (June 13, 2015) https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/campaign-kickoff-speech/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=20150613genius_social# Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

Parting, Daughters

“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.”

Walter Pater (1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer

On the Mona Lisa, in Leonardo da Vinci The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“Many of my male colleagues who have suffered imprisonment for their part in the democracy movement have spoken of the great debt of gratitude they owe their womenfolk, particularly to their wives who stood by them firmly, tender as mothers nursing their newly born, brave as lionesses defending their young. These magnificent human beings who have done so much to aid their men in the struggle for justice and peace -- how much more could they not achieve if given the opportunity to work in their own right for the good of their country and of the world.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)

Men, World, Peace, Justice

“Go away, image of my living mother, full of life, as I saw her in France for the last time. Go away! My mother's ghost.”

Albert Cohen (1895–1981) Swiss writer

Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954)

Life, Time

“Idleness is the mother of all vices, but also of all virtues.”

Alain (1868–1951) French philosopher

Men of Action
Alain On Happiness (1928)

“Halliburton, Richard. (1942). Richard Halliburton: His Story of His Life's Adventure, As told in Letters to his Mother and Father. Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co. (Original work published 1940 by Bobbs-Merrill Co.)”

Richard Halliburton (1900–1939) American writer

References

Life

“O mother! hear thy country's plea:
Nurture thy sons with spirits strong
Led by the torch of truth whose flame
Will banish ignorance and wrong.”

Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) Georgian poet and politician; a saint of Georgian Orthodox Church

Source: Anthology of Georgian Poetry (1948), Lines to a Georgian Mother, p. 59

Truth, Strong, Country

“O Mother of Good Counsel, lend
Intelligence to me!
Encompass me with wisdom,
Thou Tower of Ivory!
"This is the Man of Lies," she says,
"Disguised with fearful art:
He has the wounded hands and feet,
But not the wounded heart."”

Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918) American poet, editor, literary critic, soldier

Main Street and Other Poems (1917), The Robe of Christ

Wisdom, Fear, Art, Intelligence

“I don't believe in pretending to be someone else. I'm what I actually am in real life. For instance, like any normal girl, I fight with my mother. I mean, it is just fine. In fact, I fight daily with my mother.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

Asked about maintaining her image http://www.timesofindia.com/entertainment/hindi/music/news/I-am-a-girl-next-door-Shreya-Ghoshal/articleshow/9455640.cms

Life, Girl, Fight

“Materialism is our great enemy. It is the chief "ism" we have to combat and conquer. It is the mother of all the "isms". Without the conquest of materialism, our nations will decay from within while we prepare to defend ourselves against attacks from without.”

Frank Buchman (1878–1961) Evangelical theologist

Remaking the world, The Speeches of Frank N.D. Buchman, Blandford Presss 1947, revised 1958, p. 126
Quotes on the war of ideas

“Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

King Aegistheus, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

Soul, Thinking, Change, Time

“The Working Man as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable faculties not a few both to do and to endure,—among which the faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature, which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the Working Man. As for the Priest, though his trade was clearly of a reading and speaking nature, he knew also in those veracious times that grammar, if needful, was by no means the one thing needful, or the chief thing. By far the chief thing needful, and indeed the one thing then as now, was, That there should be in him the feeling and the practice of reverence to God and to men; that in his life's core there should dwell, spoken or silent, a ray of pious wisdom fit for illuminating dark human destinies;—not so much that he should possess the art of speech, as that he should have something to speak!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Life, Wisdom, Men, God

“Judged by the evolving nineteenth-century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women’s roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands, Black women were practically anomalies.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Women, Race and Class (1983)

Women

“I rejoice to think that since the days of Queen Elizabeth, our laws have been so far humanized that a bastard child is no longer a mere thing to be shunned by an overseer,—whose existence is unrecognised until it becomes a pauper, and whose only legitimate home is a workhouse, that it is no longer permissible to punish its unfortunate mother with hard labour for a year, nor its father with a whipping at the cart's tail; but that even an illegitimate child may find itself a member of some honest family, and that the sole obligation now cast upon its parents is that each may be compelled to bear his and her own fair share of the maintenance and education of the unfortunate offspring of their common failing.”

Henry Hawkins, 1st Baron Brampton (1817–1907) British judge

Hardy v. Atherton (1881), L. R. 7 Q. B. 269.

Education, Family, Law, Home

“One of the most common failings [when writing a drum track] is repetition. Nobody wants to hear that same stupid 16-line bass-snare pattern throughout the WHOLE song. Didn't your mother ever teach you that variety is the spice of life?”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

"Melodic Structure", Necros, TraxWeekly #15, 1995

Life, Stupidity

“Mother or Murderer, you have
given or taken life —
Now all is one!”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

"Three Poems of the Atomic Bomb: Dirge for the New Sunrise"
The Canticle of the Rose (1949)

Life

“A recollection. The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.”

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

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

Life, Death, War, Sister

“I listened to the pastors and elders in my churches. I listened to my mother who stayed home to raise my brother and me. I listened to my father, who worked hard every day in a blue collar job; a man who sacrificed his dreams to put food on the table and put his children through college and leave a pension to support my mom when he passed away. I listened to my grandfather, who was from Georgetown, South Carolina. Like my mom and dad, my grandfather never went to college, but he was a proud man, a smart man, and he filled my brother and me with big dreams about the lives we could lead. He taught me that my destiny had not been written before I was born – that my destiny was in my hands.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2000s, A Challenge to Overcome (November 2007)

Children, Food, Dreams, Home

“I'd grown up thinking I was ugly, ugly, ugly. I was much too tall, I was much too skinny, I was flat-chested, I had my mother's Asian eyes and cheekbones so I looked foreign compared to all my girlfriends, my mouth was too big and my teeth were too big so I never smiled. And then Françoise Hardy had her breakthrough in France and everything suddenly changed. Before her you were supposed to look like Brigitte Bardot, blonde, curvy and busty. But I was about twenty when people started telling me "You know what, you look a little like Françoise Hardy, you could be a model" and then out of the blue this famous woman, the great Catherine Harlé turns up. By sheer accident she happened to see me in the street in Paris and asked me if I wanted to be a fashion model and I thought she was joking! And she said "No, no, no, you're exactly the type of girl we're looking for" and all of a sudden all of these flaws, all the things I'd been so ashamed of, became my greatest assets. By sheer accident, as most things in my career.
Confessions Orbitales (Radio broadcast). Europe 1. 8 March 2003.”

Amanda Lear (1939) singer, lyricist, composer, painter, television presenter, actress, model

People, Smile, Girl, Fashion

“In response to the plummeting popularity of the Administration itself, revealed at Newbury and in the shire county elections, we have the Prime Minister's botched reshuffle. If we were to offer that tale of events to the BBC light entertainment department as a script for a programme, I think that the producers of "Yes, Minister" would have turned it down as hopelessly over the top. It might have even been too much for "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em". The tragedy for us all is that it is really happening— it is fact, not fiction. The man with the non-Midas touch is in charge. It is no wonder that we live in a country where the Grand National does not start and hotels fall into the sea.”

John Smith (1938–1994) Labour Party leader from Scotland (1938-1994)

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993-06-09/Debate-1.html, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 226, col. 292. House of Commons speech, 9 June 1993. That year's Grand National horse race had been declared void after a start-line mishap. The Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough began to fall into the sea on 3 June 1993 due to coastal erosion.

Thinking, Light, Sea, Country

“My lifestyle is very healthy. I eat very healthy and we cook at home. We don't eat out a lot, we don't go out for fast food a lot -- and it's the same with the children. I'm a pain in the butt with my children. I want them to eat right. They hate me for it a lot of times, but I don't want to make my life easy and skip those roles that I feel like I have to have as a mother.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Interview with Stylelist.com, 10 February 2010 http://www.stylelist.com/2010/02/10/heidi-klum-heart-truth-red-dress/.

Life, Pain, Hate, Children

“And beyond what has been said, experience, which is the mother of all things, undeceives us and removes all our doubts.”

Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1460–1533) Portuguese explorer

As quoted in Robertson The Hispanic American historical review, Vol 16 (1936), p. 325
Variant translation: Experiment is the mother of realities, removes our errors and solves our doubts [and by the same method of experiment] we are able to protect ourselves against the delusions and fables that some ancient cosmographers have left us in writing.
As quoted in Welch Europe's discovery of South Africa (1937), p. 95
cf. Esmeraldo de situ orbis, Book IV, ch. I, p. 152: Craramente se mostra ser falso o que escrevêram; poys debaixo da mesma equinocial há tanta habitaçam de jente, quanto teemos sabida e praticada; e como quer que a experiencia he madre das cousas, por ella soubemos rradicalmente a verdade.

“Now ACORN has been named one of the national partners, which will be a recipient again of federal money. And they will be in charge of going door-to-door and collecting data from the American public. This is very concerning because the mother lode of all data information will be from the Census. And, of course, we think of the Census as just counting how many people live in your home. Unfortunately, the Census data has become very intricate, very personal (with) a lot of the questions that are asked. And I know for my family the only question that we will be answering is how many people are in our home. We won't be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn't require any information beyond that.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Washington Times interview http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/17/exclusive-minn-lawmaker-fears-census-abuse/, 2009-06-17, quoted in * Michele Bachmann claims ACORN getting money to work for Census Bureau Politifact http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/26/michele-bachmann/michele-bachmann-claims-acorn-getting-money-work-c/ 2011-04-15 2010s

Money, People, Family, Home

“Mother Teresa is a true daughter of the Church in having her mind and heart closed to the religions of the countries of her labour, even adoption. Sometime back, some European Vedantists learning that she was at the Vatican went there to pay their respects. She rebuked them for "betraying Christ". Let me clarify the point a little further by bringing in Sister Nivedita. She is a lady Hindus are proud of. She helped India by helping it to rediscover itself. No higher service could be rendered to a nation in the grip of self-forgetfulness. She stood for national justice for India and she helped us by giving us national pride. This explains why Sister Nivedita is Hindu India's hero. This also explains why Western nations shower praise and money on Mother Teresa while Sister Nivedita remained unsung in the West and there were no contributions from that quarter even for her purely humanitarian work, like education and child care and relief work which she did with no less dedication, sympathy and loving care.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Quoted from Catholic Ashrams by S.R. Goel, Appendix V.

Love, Money, Education, Religion

“Who is that goddess to whom men should pray
But her from whom their hearts have turned away,
Out of whose virgin being they were born,
Whose mother nature they have named in scorn
Calling its holy substance common clay.
Yet from this so despised earth was made
The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed
Their generations with a light caress,
And from some image of whose loveliness
The heart built up high heaven when it prayed.”

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

By Still Waters (1906)

Men, Nature, Light, Heart

“I always found it ironic when a Saudi official bashes Islamists, given that Saudi Arabia is the mother of all political Islam — and even describes itself as an in its “ Higher Law.” (We avoid the term “constitution” because of its secular interpretation and often say that the Koran is our constitution.)”

Jamal Khashoggi (1958–2018) Saudi Arabian journalist

"Saudi Arabia wasn’t always this repressive. Now it’s unbearable." in The Washington Post (18 September 2017)

Law

“With the cry I wake;—and around me
The mother and child at her feet
Breathe peace in even whispers;
And the night falls heavy and sweet.”

Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) English poet and critic

Past and Present

Peace, Cry, Night

“Gay and straight men have much more in common than do gay men with lesbians or straight men with straight women. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. This is the agonizing myth-pattern in the comic, matricidal Psycho (1960), one of the hauntingly emblematic films of our time.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 23

Women, Men, Time

“I was very happy. I thought I would cut my way through life.... victory after victory, [laughing.. ] Well, I adjusted as soon as they carried me into my mother. Half of my victories fell to the ground.. [she pauses].. My mother had victories.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

her candid, weather-beaten face darkens abruptly
Mary Lance, in 'With My Back to the World' a documentary made in 2002; as quoted by Olivia Laing,
Martin claimed she could remember the exact moment of her birth. She had entered the world, she tells Lance, 'as a small figure with a little sword'
after 2000

Life, Happiness, Way, Victory

“As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future.”

Vanessa Redgrave (1937) English actress

Redgrave: Actress and campaigner http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2551773.stm, (6 December 2002), BBC News. accessed 17 December 2006.

Future

“…But they accuse us of being terrorists. Terrorists, because when the Palestinian mother welcomes her martyred son, she wishes to receive him as a corpse. She does not want him to be alive…. The wish of the Palestinian mother is to see the body of her son the martyr…”

Ibrahim Mudeiris

Preaching Poison http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stalinsky200403190914.asp (March 2004)

“A Government with Heart who will protect our environment and heed the cries of Mother Nature.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate

Nature, Heart

“If the coup victories so we can look forward to a long conflict because we refuse to bend. We are not afraid of their guns. Honduras army pattern just 7000 men. If we take up arms, we would quickly run away so few soldiers. But our goal is to allocate the regime in a peaceful and honorable way. Women, children, youth, students, workers - we all have united us in a civic front against the coup. Even my 80 year old mother to the streets and practice non-violent resistance.”

Manuel Zelaya (1952) President of Honduras

Women, Men, Children, Youth

“Now that I was able to play World of Warcraft at my mother’s house with no limitations, aside from school and homework, I became very addicted to the game and my character in it. It was all I cared about.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Pastimes

World, School, Game, Housing

“[W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 46.

Women

“She [Lee’s mother] was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red. She lived the easy laws of the hedgerow, loved the world and made no plans, had a quick holy eye for natural wonders and couldn’t have kept a neat house for her life.”

Laurie Lee book Cider with Rosie

Source: Cider with Rosie (1959), p. 144.

Love, Life, Happiness, World

“Our first appreciation of music comes through the sounds of the mother, especially her voice and her lullaby. Our earliest musical expression, of which speech is a part, is in a sense a duet with her. And later in life we should still be able to discern the voice of love in the music.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: The Life Energy in Music, Vol. 1 (1981), p. 25

Love, Life, Music, Sense

“My mother always said to me, 'You're going to have to work harder and have to be better, and you can't take no for an answer.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

Angela Dawson (February 23, 2002) "Pick of the Crop", The Courier Mail, p. M10.

“It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

1992 The Redfern Speech, launching International Year of Indigenous Peoples

Life, Children, Alcohol, Disease

“Our Mother is to us in diverse manners working: in whom our parts are kept undisparted. For in our Mother Christ we profit and increase, and in Mercy He reformeth us and restoreth, and, by the virtue of His Passion and His Death and Uprising, oneth us to our Substance. Thus worketh our Mother in Mercy to all His children which are to Him yielding and obedient.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 58

Death, Children, Passion, Christ

“We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?”

Ellen Goodman (1941) American journalist and writer

Attributed

“I nodded. This was something that I really liked a lot about my mother and father. They were always thinking ahead so we didn’t make the same mistake twice.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Thinking

“You will form a very inadequate estimate of a man's character, if you judge by what a fond sister says of him. The worst of them generally know how to hide their misdeeds from their sisters' eyes, and their mother's, too.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XX : Persistence; Mrs. Maxwell to Helen

Sister

“Mother was the disciplinarian, but it was Daddy who could turn me into an angel with just one look.”

Mary Martin (1913–1990) American actress

Source: My Heart Belongs (1976), p. 19

Angels

“A lot of that just comes from my upbringing. I have a tremendous mother and father, I grew up in the church, I have a very religious family. I’m not all about myself just because I know if it wasn’t for God, I wouldn’t be able to go out there and compete anyway. So I never look at it as a selfish thing—I never want all the attention or want it to be about me, because I never want to get in to a situation where God has to humble me. I know for a fact that I am not doing it by myself; it is because of Him that I can compete over and over again. That’s basically how I grew up. I was blessed and fortunate to have a family like I have.”

Javon Ringer (1987) All-American college football player, professional football player, running back

Quoted here http://collegefootballinsiders.blogspot.com/2009/04/q-javon-ringer-rb-michigan-st.htm

God, Family, Selfishness

“Their [those with eating disorders'] task is to rescue themselves from a drive that is destroying them. Food embodies the false values that their own bodies refuse to assimilate, by which I mean that their bodies become edemic, bloated, allergic, or resort to vomiting the poison out. The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Addiction to Perfection (1982), p. 15

Food, Falseness

“Manuel Mercado Acosta is an indio from the mountains of Durango. His father operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out. He met my mother while riding a motorcycle in El Paso. Juana Fierro Acosta is my mother. She could have been a singer in a Juarez cantina but instead decided to be Manuel’s wife because he had a slick mustache, a fast bike and promised to take her out of the slums across from the Rio Grande. She had only one demand in return for the two sons and three daughters she would bear him: “No handouts. No relief. I never want to be on welfare.” I doubt he really promised her anything in a very loud, clear voice. My father was a horsetrader even though he got rid of both the mustache and the bike when FDR drafted him, a wetback, into the U. S. Navy on June 22, 1943. He tried to get into the Marines, but when they found out he was a good swimmer and a non-citizen they put him in a sailor suit and made him drive a barge in Okinawa. We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in 100-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at 5:00 A. M. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 72.

Mountain, Business, Water, Reading

“A baby was sleeping,
Its mother was weeping,
For her husband was far on the wild-raging sea.”

Samuel Lover (1797–1868) Irish song-writer, novelist, and painter

The Angel's Whisper, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Sleep, Rage, Baby, Sea

“In brief, when a man fails as a wallet, we put him in prison; when a woman fails as a mother, we offer her social services. We’re taking a criminal approach to men, a social services approach to women.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 179.

Women, Men

“O brave youth, how good for thee it were couldst thou be made to understand how infinitely precious are thy school years—years when thou hast leisure to grow, when new worlds break in upon thee, and thou fashionest thy being in the light of the ideals of truth and goodness and beauty! If now thou dost not fit thyself to become free and whole, thou shalt, when the doors of this fair mother-house of the mind, close behind thee, be driven into ways that lead to bondage, be compelled to do that which cripples and dwarfs; for the work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture. Ah! well for thee, canst thou learn while yet there is time that it will profit thee nothing to become the possessor of millions, if the price thou payest is thy manhood.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 58-59

Men, Truth, Youth, World

“Sian Lloyd – what was she doing there? Why did you cast and pay for a kind of celebrity for your advert? You know, I could understand if your advert was based on weather, I could understand if your advert was based on her being upset because her boyfriend blew her out for a cheeky girl, right and she's crying, but I can't understand this. She's not even a mother, what's the point?”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

Episode 9
The Apprentice, Series 4

Girl, Understanding, Cry, Weather

“The weather is superb except for a very keen wind which causes me to lose much time. - I am doing a portrait of your mother in pastel, it seems it is not adequate as a likeness, it is too old, too red, not fine enough, in short, it won't do. This surprises me not at all. You know that everyone accepts the one I made pretty obvious, but that is not much good either.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter to his son Lucien, Osny, 10 April 1885; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 26
1880's

Time, Weather

“My mother [Eva] told me he used to go behind enemy lines, rub shoulders with the enemy forces and never get caught. … He was always saying how we have to live in harmony with all living things in this world.—Duncan Pegahmagabow”

Francis Pegahmagabow (1891–1952) World War I sniper

son
[harv, June 30, 2005, 2005, http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/sub.cfm?source=history/other/native/peaceful, Native Soldiers - Foreign Battlefields, Veterans Affairs Canada, 2010-05-11, Veterans Affairs Canada]

World

“Why are there stars when there are no people? O God, why don't you just extinguish them? — Cool my brow, ancient night! Divine and fair as you always were — O night, what purpose do you serve? There are no lovers, no dreams. O nursemaid, dead as a sleep without dreams, you no longer hallow anyone's prayers. O mother of us all, you don't bless a single heart smitten with love. There is no love.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

Love, God, People, Dreams

“It is generally believed that scientific talent reveals itself in early youth. […] This was certainly not my case. I somehow slid into my scientific profession. My mother wished for me to become a physician, just like my father. […] I myself wanted to be a lawyer, defender of the unjustly accused. But my career is the result of political circumstances, academic possibilities, and lucky accidents.”

Fred Jelinek (1932–2010) Czech linguist

Talking about his life in a 2001 speech Source: Jelinek, Frederick. " How I Got Here http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/people/jelinek/promoce.html" Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia (November 22, 2001). Retrieved on December 17, 2010. Honoris causa degree acceptance speech.

Youth

“The elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me

Source: Between the World and Me (2015), p. 8.

Life, Children, Family, Wine

“On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

Source: The Joy Luck Club (1989), Ch. 13, pg. 240

Soul

“Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender. Amazon societies are also important because women were trained to be warriors—military and, presumably, in other ways as well. ...

In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been … ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.

In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), pp. 335–336 (emphases in original), and see Women and Madness (1972), pp. 284–285 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Women, Men, Sex, Way

“I've made use of the beautiful weather to sketch and paint outside. I had been staying away from color for such a long time that it had become something quite foreign to me. Working in color was always a great joy to me. And now it is a great joy again. Still, I have to battle with it, wrestle with it, with all my strength. And one must be victorious. But if it weren't for the fight, all the beauty of it wouldn't exist at all, would it? I'm writing this mostly for Mother who, I believe, thinks my whole life is one constant act of egoistic ecstasy. But devotion to art also involves something unselfish.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her parents, from Worpswede, 10 September 1899; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 199
1899

Life, Beauty, Art, Color

“Her children knew she's sleeping with all these men. That just seems to me, it's the definition of "not a good mother." … Is everyone just saying here that it's okay to ostentatiously have premarital sex in front of your children? … [Diana is] an ordinary and pathetic and confessional — I've never had bulimia! I've never had an affair! I've never had a divorce! So I don't think she's better than I am.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Statement on MSNBC (19 September 1997) as quoted in "The Wit and Wisdom (NOT) of Ann Coulter" (4 September 2004) http://www.americanpolitics.com/20020205Coulter.html. 1980s-90s

Men, Children, Sex, Thinking

“One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grownup; he believes, even, that being a grownup is a mistake he will never make—when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grownup live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grownups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grownups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again—still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grownup looks to a child.
Grownups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them.”

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

“An Unread Book’, pp. 51–52
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Love, God, Children, Stupidity

“A man on a park bench has a lonely final look, as if to say: “Reduce humanity to its ultimate particles and you end here; beyond this single separate being you cannot go.” But if you look back into his life you cannot help seeing that he is separated off, not separate—is a later, singular stage of an earlier plural being. All the tongues of men were baby talk to begin with: go back far enough and which of us knew where he ended and Mother and Father and Brother and Sister began? The singular subject in its objective universe has evolved from that orginal composite entity—half subjective, half objective, having its own ways and laws and language, its own life and its own death—the family.”

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

“An Unread Book”, p. 3; opening
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Life, Death, Men, Family

“Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Life, Death, Food, Home

“I believe that life begins at conception. And abortion under no circumstances. … No, it comes down to it's not the government's role or anybody else's role to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you're not talking about that big a number. So what I'm saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn't have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue. … The government shouldn't be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to social decisions that they need to make.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

Piers Morgan Tonight
Television
2011-11-19
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1110/19/pmt.01.html, quoted in * The pro-life candidate who’s pro-choice
Political Animal
2011-10-20
Steve
Benen
Washington Monthly
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/the_prolife_candidate_whos_pro032941.php
2011-10-23
on abortion

Life, People, Family, Decision

“But the lover of intelligence must be patient with those who cannot readily share his passion. Some pangs the mind will inflict upon the heart. It is a mistake to think that men are united by elemental affections. Our affections divide us. We strike roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our locality, the customs and the language in which we were brought up. Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced roots of affection must be pulled up. These are the old pangs of intelligence, which still comes to set a man at variance against his father, saying, “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.””

John Erskine (1879–1951) American educator

Source: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (1915), p. 30

Love, Men, Intelligence, Lovers

“I know it wasn't the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn't I be like that to her?”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

§48
'Tis (2000)

Wine

“The Boss: The State’s your mother, your father, the totality of your interests. No discipline can be too severe for the man that denies that by word or deed.”

H. G. Wells book The Shape of Things to Come

Things to Come (1936)

“I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

My Life on The Road

Women, Way, Feeling, Anger

“Charles Darwin's evolution theory states that the strong eat the weak. According to Darwin's evolution theory we are the worst people. But it is actually not so. It is a natural universal law. If we take Darwin's evolution theory literally then God is the worst kind of being. Because God planned creation in a certain way. When love is involved there is no evil. Even mother birds sacrifice their own lives for the sake of their babies.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

TRUE DAY OF ALL THINGS AND THE INITIATOR OF HARMONY http://www.unification.net/1997/970605.html, June 5, 1997

Love, God, People, Law

“That same night I went into the chicken coop, took my hooked knife which I used to pit peaches with, and carved her initials on the back side of my left hand … JA. Jane Addison. My first true love. The original Miss It. I was in such a fog that I forgot to cover it with a glove or something. At supper, right in front of my mother, my brother Bob said in a loud voice, “What’s that on your hand?” I pretended not to hear. I quickly switched my fork to my right hand and put my left hand under the table. “Hey, mom. Oscar cut himself,” the bastard said. “What?””

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

she cried out. She couldn’t stand violence unless it was part of some beating to teach me respect.
Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 89.

Love, Moms, Parting, Night

“What goes 0-300 in less than 2 seconds? Your mother on a scale.”

Alex Trebek (1940) Canadian-American television personality

Justinson, C.H.L. Down and Dirty, pg 32.

“Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical…”

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) French painter

Soliloques. (1944)
Quotes, 1940-1950

Love, Way, Feeling, Understanding

“Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearsay of little children tends towards the formation of character.”

Hosea Ballou (1771–1852) American Universalist minister (1771–1852)

Manuscript, Sermons; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 216.

Children, Education

“We built pyramids before Donald Trump even knew what architecture was. We taught philosophy and astrology [sic] and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it…Do some cracker come and tell you, ‘Well my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,’ you better hold your pocket. That ain’t nothing to be proud of, that means their forefathers was crooks.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

Speech at Kean College (1994), transcribed in The Forward (December 1995), as quoted in Foolish Words : The Most Stupid Words Ever Spoken (2003) by Laura Ward, p. 192.

Mathematics

“Cosmides and Tooby argue that music's function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction. …Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement…”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Music, Exercises, Singing, Help

“Thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like trees in a storm.
Blessed be God's name?
Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death, God, Children, Tree

“I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was OK and to thank her, because I'm glad I didn't end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have me.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

As quoted in Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson, p. 254
2010s

“One of my brothers was nearly of my own age; and he it was whom I most loved, though I was very fond of them all, and they of me. He and I used to read Lives of Saints together. When I read of martyrdom undergone by the Saints for the love of God, it struck me that the vision of God was very cheaply purchased; and I had a great desire to die a martyr's death, — not out of any love of Him of which I was conscious, but that I might most quickly attain to the fruition of those great joys of which I read that they were reserved in Heaven; and I used to discuss with my brother how we could become martyrs. We settled to go together to the country of the Moors, begging our way for the love of God, that we might be there beheaded; and our Lord, I believe, had given us courage enough, even at so tender an age, if we could have found the means to proceed; but our greatest difficulty seemed to be our father and mother.”

Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) Roman Catholic saint

Source: The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus (c.1565), Ch. I "Childhood and early Impressions" ¶ 4

Love, Death, God, Age

“We doubt not the destiny of our country — that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

"American Facts" in Life Without and Life Within (1860) edited by Arthur Buckminster Fuller, p. 108.

World, Way, Nature, Falseness

“In those days I could hate Adam Scott very easily. I was, I suppose, very jealous of him having a relationship with and the attention of my mother. I sometimes felt that we, the Nilsen kids, were an impediment to her fulfillment in her new life and family. I was a very lonely and turbulent child. I inhabited my own secret world full of ideal and imaginary friends. Nature had mismatched me from the flock.”

Dennis Nilsen (1945–2018) British serial killer

As quoted by Brian Masters (2011), Killing for Company, Random House, p. 53, ISBN 1446428737

Life, Hate, Secret, World

“… [I]t is our being bad brothers and sisters that leads us to be bad fathers and mothers, not our having bad fathers and mothers that has made us bad brothers and sisters.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), "Jesus' fraternal relocation of God", p. 65.

Sister

“When Christianity is received, it stimulates the faculties, and calls forth new ideas, new motives, and new sentiments. It has been the mother of all modern education.”

James McCosh (1811–1894) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 139.

Education, Motivation, Idea

“Geraldine: I've no idea who my father was.
Prentice: I'd better be frank, Miss Barclay. I can't employ you if you're in any way miraculous. It would be contrary to established practice. You did have a father?
Geraldine: Oh, I'm sure I did. My mother was frugal in her habits, but she'd never economize unwisely.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

What the Butler Saw (1969), Act I

Way, Idea

“Since my mother shaved her Hitler mustache, we look nothing alike.”

Bill Allred

Radio From Hell (September 12, 2006)

“She asked, “Do you believe science has all the answers?”
“Huh?”
“Science. Does it have all the answers?”
“Everybody thinks he’s being oh-so-deep when he says science doesn’t have all the answers.”
Done. All of it. Virginity gone, flesh ratified, mother spited, mission discovered—the gospel of empirical truth! Yes! Oh, yes!
“Science does have all the answers,” said Howard, withdrawing. “The problem is that we don’t have all the science.””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 5 (p. 90)

Truth, Problem, Thinking, Science

“An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art.
The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Education (1902)

Love, Art, Reality, Sense

“In spring I stopped eating the bodies of living things. Nonetheless, the other day I ate several slices of tuna sashimi as a form of magic to “undertake” my “communication” with “society.” I also stirred a cup of chawanmushi with a spoon. If the fish, while being eaten, had stood behind me and watched, what would he have thought? “I gave up my only life and this person is eating my body as if it were something distasteful.” “He’s eating me in anger.” “He’s eating me out of desperation.” “He’s thinking of me and, while quietly savoring my fat with his tongue, praying, ‘Fish, you will come with me as my companion some day, won’t you?’” “Damn! He’s eating my body!” Well, different fish would have had different thoughts. … Suppose I were the fish, and suppose that not only I were being eaten but my father were being eaten, my mother were being eaten, and my sister were also being eaten. And suppose I were behind the people eating us, watching. “Oh, look, that man has torn apart my sibling with chopsticks. Talking to the person next to him, he swallowed her, thinking nothing of it. Just a few minutes ago her body was lying there, cold. Now she must be disintegrating in a pitch-dark place under the influence of mysterious enzymes. Our entire family have given up our precious lives that we value, we’ve sacrificed them, but we haven’t won a thimbleful of pity from these people.””

Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933) Japanese poet and author of children's literature

I must have been once a fish that was eaten. Letter to Hosaka (May 1918); as quoted in Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, edited by Hiroaki Sato (University of California Press, 2007), pp. 12 https://books.google.it/books?id=D7IwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA12-13.

Life, People, Family, Spring

“"Do you love him?" Maura asked curiously.
"I'd rather not," Blue replied.
"He has lots of negative qualities I can help you hone in on," her mother offered.
"I'm already aware of them. Infinitely."”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

pg 82
The Raven Cycle Series, The Raven King (2016)

Love, Help

“I often went to bed without supper 'cause I hated my mother's cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she'd make me eat.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

NOW interview (2004)

Hate, Hurt, Cooking

“Fifty years ago the legal injustice imposed upon women was appalling. Wives, widows and mothers seemed to have been hunted out by the law on purpose to see in how many ways they could be wronged and made helpless. A wife by her marriage lost all right to any personal property she might have. The income of her land went to her husband, so that she was made absolutely penniless. If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar. If a woman wrote a book the copyright of the same belonged to her husband and not to her. The law counted out in many states how many cups and saucers, spoons and knives and chairs a widow might have when her husband died. I have seen many a widow who took the cups she had bought before she was married and bought them again after her husband died, so as to have them legally. The law gave no right to a married woman to any legal existence at all. Her legal existence was suspended during marriage. She could neither sue nor be sued. If she had a child born alive the law gave her husband the use of all her real estate as long as he should live, and called it by the pleasant name of "the estate by courtesy."”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

When the husband died the law gave the widow the use of one-third of the real estate belonging to him, and it was called the "widow's encumbrance."
The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Women, Marriage, Books, Law

“By the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one constant of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive sense of self-consciousness that sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock 'n' roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about fifteen stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country! So we loved and loved and doted on ourselves and our reflections in each other even as the whole thing got out of hand and turned into mud and disaster areas and downs and death.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"James Taylor Marked for Death" (1971), p. 66
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Love, Death, Sense, Time