"The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.""
— Anna Quindlen

"Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over – empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up."
— Sharon Creech (Walk Two Moons)

"Because the truth was, there was a dark underbelly of terror to motherhood. You loved your children with such an overwhelming fierceness that you were absolutely vulnerable at every moment of every day: They could be taken from you. Somehow, you could lose them. You could stop at the corner to buy a newspaper when a drunk driver veered onto the sidewalk. You could feed your child an E. coli-tainted hamburger. You could turn your head for a second while one darted out into the street. The threats to your child were infinite. And the thing was, if any of your children's lives were ruined, even a little bit, yours wold be, too."
— Katherine Center (Everyone Is Beautiful: A Novel)

"The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires."
— Dorothy Parker

"So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure."
— Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)

"The mother...swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood. "
— Victor Hugo

"Burnt toast is actually fairly symbolic of Motherhood. If you are the one who burned the toast, you scrape if off and eat it yourself. If they burned it, you eat it because the burned it specially for you."
— Emily Watts

"Motherhood is the greatest potential influence either for good or ill in human life. The mother's image is the first that stamps itself on the unwritten page of the young child's mind. It is her caress that first awakens a sense of security; her kiss, the first realization of affection; her sympathy and tenderness, the first assurance that there is love in the world."
— David O. McKay

"I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. I don’t think it’s such a big thing anymore, but the idea that you sacrifice everything for your children—it’s a load of rubbish. It leads to very destructive living and thinking, and it has a much worse effect on children than if you go out and live your own life. You’re meant to adore your children at all times, and you’re not meant to have a bad thought about them. That’s facism, you know, and it’s elevating the child at the expense of the mother. It’s like your life is not valid except in fulfilling this child’s needs. What about all your needs, your desires, your wants, your problems? They’re going to come out anyway, so it’s better they’re acknowledged straight off. Having said that, I really do believe that children have to be protected. They have to be loved. Somewhere between the two, I think, something needs to be sorted out. The relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex. There’s every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would alleviate them in some way” "
— Marina Carr

"If you're like us -mothers with an attitude problem- you may be getting increasingly irritable about this chasm between the ridiculous, honey-hued ideals of perfect motherhood in the mass media and the reality of mothers' everyday lives."
— Susan Douglas (The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women)

"Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done.
"
— Rebecca Woolf

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. "
— Pete Seeger

"Try not to have a good time...this is supposed to be educational."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
— Mahatma Gandhi