"No man is poor who has a Godly mother."
— Abraham Lincoln

"But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin."
— Mitch Albom (For One More Day)

"The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"A mother's body remembers her babies..."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly."
— Ambrose Bierce

"I ask you, what good is a big picture window and the lavish appointments and a priceless decor in a home if there is no mother there?"
— Spencer W. Kimball (The Miracle of Forgiveness)

""It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.
It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.
What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.
Now even that had flickered out.
How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.
Somebody did.
A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You alright?"
"Yes," I said.
"You've been standing here a long time," he said.
"I know," I said.
"You waiting for somebody?" he said.
"No," I said.
"Better move on, don't you think?" he said.
"Yes, sir," I said.
And I moved on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"I don't know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory."
— Mitch Albom

"By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

"The Simple Path
Silence is Prayer
Prayer is Faith
Faith is Love
Love is Service
The Fruit of Service is Peace"
— Mother Teresa

"Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand."
— Haven Kimmel

"Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

""Turn off the light," she says as she walks away, creating a small woosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors: A Memoir)

"Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face."
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"- You look fine.
- Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. "
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"My mother's life was way too heavy for me."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"My mother was an avid reader...She loved books about romance. Books that took place in faraway places and times. Stories with costumes..."
— Adriana Trigiani

"Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"When you feel neglected, think of the female salmon, who lays 3,000,000 eggs but no one remembers her on Mother's Day"
— Sam Ewing

""Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her..."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter."
— Anchee Min (Red Azalea)

""It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. . . . It is mother’s influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child’s basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother’s loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother’s influence and teaching in the home—and how apparent when neglected!"
"
— Ezra Taft Benson

"Profound joy of the heart is like a magnet that indicates the path of life. "
— Told to Mother Teresa by a Confessor

"A boy never had a better friend than a dog; especially when his mother made her God awful meatloaf or cow tongue sandwiches."
— Charles F. Emery Jr.

"I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual, and physical education which I received from my mother."
— George Washington

"God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul."
— Phyllis McGinley

"You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Tomoko, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone's going to lose life writing to you? Of course I cried; I was eight and I had already planned that Tomoko and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn't write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I'm not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"But not you, O girl, nor yet his
mother,
stretched his eyebrows so fierce with
expectation.
Not for your mouth, you who hold him
now,
did his lips ripen into these fervent
contours.
Do you really think your quiet
footsteps
could have so convulsed him, you who
move like dawn wind?
True, you startled his heart; but older
terrors
rushed into him with that first jolt
to his emotions.
Call him . . . you'll never quite
retrieve him from those dark consorts.
Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved,
he makes a home
in your familiar heart, takes root
there and begins himself anew.
But did he ever begin himself?"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"As my mother says, your forties are when you finally pay for your past mistakes, the cigarettes and sunburns, the Big Macs and smooth-talking men. She may be right."
— Sarah Strohmeyer (Sweet Love)

"Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different before, I don't remember."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" Pointing to his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers... (Matthew 12:48)"
— Various (Holy Bible: New Living Translation Version)

""But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work." "
— Gloria Whelan

"You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"I wasn't put on this earth to be housekeeper to my own child or to anyone else for that matter."
— Lynn Freed

"A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Isn't this the truth of any good mother? That in all of our lives. We worry only about those we brought into this world, regardless of whether they loved us back or treated us fairly or understood our shortcomings."
— Adriana Trigiani (Big Cherry Holler)

""Sometimes being a good mother gets in the way of being a good person.""
— Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey (A Woman of Independent Means)

"I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no food reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that fins all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
"It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"Our Mother feedeth thus our little life, That we may in turn feed her with our death"
— James Thomson