"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."
— Calvin Trillin

"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

"How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline.
"I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave."
"Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline.
"Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back."
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway."
— Erma Bombeck

"Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"The big difference between my mom and me-- besides the fact that she is dead normal and I'm a magic-handling freak-- is that she's the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other people's points of view, but she's honest about it. She's a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. I'm a brass-bound bitch because I don't want anyone getting close enough to find out what a whiny little knot of naked nerve endings I really am. "
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"But mothers lie. It's in the job discription."
— John Green

"No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick."
— Erma Bombeck

"Womanhood is a wonderful thing. In womankind we find the mothers of the race.There is no man so great, nor none sunk so low, but once he lay a helpless, innocent babe in a woman's arms and was dependent on her love and care for his existence. It is woman who rocks the cradle of the world and holds the first affections of mankind. She possesses a power beyond that of a king on his throne.
...Womanhood stands for all that is pure and clean and noble. She who does not make the world better for having lived in it has failed to be all that a woman should be."
— Mabel Hale (Beautiful Girlhood: A Timeless Guide for Christian Adolescense)

"You are doing God's work. You are doing it wonderfully well. He is blessing you, and He will bless you, --even--no, -especially--when your days and your nights may be most challenging. Like the woman who anonymously, meekly, perhaps even with hesitation and some embarrassment, fought her way through the crowd just to touch the hem of the Master's garment, so Christ will say to the women who worry and wonder and weep over their responsibility as mothers, `Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole.' And it will make your children whole as well."
— Jeffrey R. Holland

"Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?" Wasn't there any change?""
— Erma Bombeck

"My mother always said 'Don't bother other people.' I think that's good advice."
— Amy Sedaris (I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence)

"As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beating of my heart. I cannot now imagine a life without her."
— Kristin Hannah (Summer Island: A Novel)

"A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that turns to arthritis and settles deep into her bones. "
— Kristin Hannah (Summer Island: A Novel)

"When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark."
— John Irving

"One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was thirteen was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands - bare hands - and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage. To top that, I saw her reach into the wet garbage bag and fish around in there looking for a lost teaspoon. Bare hands - a kind of mad courage."
— Robert Fulghum

"When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument."
— C.S. Forester (African Queen)

"Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago."
— Erma Bombeck

"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)

"I think all mothers are alike, regardless of cultural background, when it comes to illogical cleaning."
— Neal Shusterman (Antsy Does Time)

""When God Created Mothers"

When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one."

And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands."

The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way."

"It's not the hands that are causing me problems," God remarked, "it's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have."

"That's on the standard model?" asked the angel. God nodded.

"One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, 'What are you kids doing in there?' when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn't but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word."

"God," said the angel touching his sleeve gently, "Get some rest tomorrow...."

"I can't," said God, "I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick...can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger...and can get a nine year old to stand under a shower."

The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. "It's too soft," she sighed.

"But tough!" said God excitedly. "You can imagine what this mother can do or endure."

"Can it think?"

"Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise," said the Creator.

Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek.

"There's a leak," she pronounced. "I told You that You were trying to put too much into this model."

"It's not a leak," said the Lord, "It's a tear."

"What's it for?"

"It's for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness, and pride."

"You are a genius, " said the angel.

Somberly, God said, "I didn't put it there."


"
— Erma Bombeck (When God Created Mothers)

"Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met."
— Marguerite Duras

"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)

"Nowadays it is seen as a shame, to marry a girl who is a mother, who has never been married. I want to get rid of that prejudice. "
— Friedrich der Große (Erster Diener seines Staates. Friedrich der Große in ausgewählten Zitaten)

"I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. "
— Nella Larsen (The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories)

"A child embarrassed by his mother is just a child who hasn't lived long enough."
— Mitch Albom (For One More Day)

"Before becoming a mother I had a hundred theories on how to bring up children. Now I have seven children and only one theory: love them, especially when they least deserve to be loved."
— Kate Samperi

"'Is Lisa going to the prom?'
I shelved my worries for the moment. 'I don't know, Mom. We don't talk about the You-Know-What. We made a pact.'
'You could go together, if you didn't want to mess with dates and things.'
'I don't want to mess with the prom at all, Mom.'
She ignored me, placidly eating popcorn, piece by piece.'Some girls in my high school class did that and had a wonderful time. They weren't lesbians or anything. Not that it would matter if they were.'
'That's nice, Mom. I'm glad you're so open-minded.' I grabbed my Coke and the popcorn bowl and headed for the stairs, because I could go my whole life without ever hearing my mother talk about lesbians again.
'Maybe you could take Justin to the prom,' she called after me, laughter in her voice. 'He is such a hottie.'
Shoot me now."
— Rosemary Clement-Moore (Prom Dates from Hell)

"But my mother's life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one season later. Oh, the monotony."
— Jacqueline Kelly

"Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things.

He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun. "
— Alexander McCall Smith (Love Over Scotland)

"Leah: I want those gubs Mommy.
Kate: They're not 'gubs' they're 'gloves'
Aaden and Leah try and say gloves
Leah: Gloves!
Kate: Good job!
Aaden: Gubs!
Kate: No"
— Kate Gosselin

"The ... office was decorated in early American Earth Mother, with spider plants, hemp wall tapestries, and beeswax candles."
— Karen Neches (Earthly Pleasures: A Novel)

"She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, one from this direction, another form behind, more and more, until his looks, his character, his soul would have eroded away . . . I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfections."
— Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)

"The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . Memories of mother drying my tears, reading aloud, cutting cookies and singing as she did, listening to prayers I said as I knelt with my forehead pressed against her knee, tucking me in bed and turning down the light. They have carried me through the years and given my life such a firm foundation that it does not rock beneath flood or tempest."
— Margaret Sanger

"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