"My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her."
— Jodi Picoult

"I don't need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk."
— L.J. Smith (Daughters of Darkness)

"What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"'Okay. I'll Help you fight. What do you think we're up against? Bears, Coyotes...'
'My Brother'"
— L.J Smith

"Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Daughters. They were sometimes as familiar and intimate as honeysuckles in bloom, but mostly daughters were mysteries. They lived in rooms you had long since abandoned and could not, did not, ever want to reenter."
— Benjamin Alire Saenz (Names on a Map: A Novel)

"The thing is- and I know this is going to sound strange-that I seem to love you sort of desperately"
— L.J. Smith (Daughters of Darkness)

"They were talking more distantly than if they were strangers who had just met, for if they had been he would have been interested in her just because of that, and curious, but their common past was a wall of indifference between them. Kitty knew too well that she had done nothing to beget her father's affection, he had never counted in the house and had been taken for granted, the bread-winner who was a little despised because he could provide no more luxuriously for his family; but she had taken for granted that he loved her just because he was her father, and it was a shock to discover that his heart was empty of feeling for her. She had known that they were all bored by him, but it had never occurred to her that he was equally bored by them. He was as ever kind and subdued, but the sad perspicacity which she had learnt in suffering suggested to her that, though he probably never acknowledged it to himself and never would, in his heart he disliked her."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"The dangerous plant did not flower in every generation, they said. "
— Amanda Quick (The Perfect Poison)

"I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own."
— Ann Patchett (The Patron Saint of Liars)

"Doomed to Hell. Every last one of you."
— June Ahern (The Skye in June)

"YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE

YOUR MOTHER UNLESS SHE IS

WHO YOU WANT TO BE. YOU DO NOT HAVE

TO BE YOUR MOTHER'S MOTHER, OR YOUR

MOTHER'S MOTHER'S MOTHER, OR EVEN

YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S MOTHER ON YOUR

FATHER'S SIDE. YOU MAY INHERIT THEIR

CHINS OR THEIR HIPS OR THEIR EYES, BUT

YOU ARE NOT DESTINED TO BECOME THE

WOMEN WHO CAME BEFORE YOU, YOU ARE

NOT DESTINED TO LIVE THEIR LIVES. SO IF

YOU INHERIT SOMETHING, INHERIT THEIR

STRENGTH. IF YOU INHERIT SOMETHING, IN-

HERIT THEIR RESILIENCE. BECAUSE THE ONLY

PERSON YOU ARE DESTINED TO BECOME IS

THE PERSON YOU DECIDE TO BE.

"
— Nike