My mother told me Homer Ditto was not my father. Nope. Mom had had a fling with some other guy who was my dad. Some dude who didn’t stick around too long who Mom was happy to get rid of. She chose Homer, and Homer chose me, so he lent me his name even though I didn’t have his blood.
Invention is the mother of necessity.
Abortion is part of being a mother and of caring for children, because part of caring for children is knowing when it’s not a good idea to bring them into the world.
When I was in Greenough, Montana, I came across a bear cub. I was off this path, and I thought, If there’s a bear cub, that means there’s a mother bear somewhere nearby. So I doubled back. If I’d kept going, I’m sure they would have eventually found my sneakers, and that’s about it.
My mother used to tell me man gives the award, God gives the reward. I don’t need another plaque.
A dog is a vehicle, you know; a dog is a window to Mother Nature, and that’s the closest species we have.
My mother was my pillar of strength.
I think my mother… made it clear that you have to live life by your own terms and you have to not worry about what other people think and you have to have the courage to do the unexpected.
Both my mother and father were very supportive of any career move any of us wanted to make.
I was born late – what my mother calls the last kick of a dying horse. There’s three of us children, but I’m 13 or 14 years younger than my brother and sister.
My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
While my mother wanted me to be a musician, I wanted to become an electronic engineer.
I want to show that the underdog can win. I believe we’re all the same: you, a slum girl, my mother.
My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.
I talk a lot about the men in my family because my mother died when I was little, and my grandmother died when my aunts were little, so we didn’t have those kinds of heads of household. But all the members of our household who were female were sort of living as equal and as wise as the male figures in our family.
My parents were divorced when I was three, and both my father and mother moved back into the homes of their parents. I spent the school year with my mother, and the summers with my dad.
I grew up going to a school where there weren’t a lot of black kids. And so my mother, from a very, very young age, has sensitized me to race.
I was an only child, and Mother was always right with me all my life. I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up-it’s a natural thing.
Obedience is the mother of success and is wedded to safety.
My mother made soft polenta often, and as a child, I would watch her stir until she looked like her arm would fall off.
I sacrificed a lot. I wasn’t able to be with my mother and father for how many months and years and then of course, training was excruciating.
Growing up my mother played Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole in the house regularly.
When I was born, my parents and my mother’s parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age – was, in a sense, me.
I was given away. If your mother gives you away, you think everybody who comes into your life is going to give you away.
I was raised by a single mother. We were definitely below the median income of our area.
No, I have not a drop of what they call white blood in my veins. My father was a full blooded Negro, and my mother was a full blooded Chippewa.
I knew I had a remarkable voice, but I was embarrassed because it was so high. But when I sang at my bar mitzvah, the rabbi was in tears. He said to my parents, ‘He must become a cantor in the synagogue,’ but my mother said, ‘No, he’s going to be a concert pianist.’
On the one hand, I am a businesswoman – on the other, a wife and a mother. Like many women, I have had to distribute time and attention between business and family. It is not at all easy to find that balance.
I have always been a flirt. My mother says whe I was a child, I used to stand outside the house and just smile at everyone who walked by. Like, ‘Please take me with you!’
I grew up in Birmingham, but my parents are originally from Barbados. My dad, Romeo, was a long-distance lorry driver, and my mother, Mayleen, worked in catering.
Unless you insult my mother or something, there is not much you could say to me that would really bother me.
My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.
My mother and brother made me strive to get good grades and get through school.
I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.
I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, ‘Is it? Why? Why is it like that?’ Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.
I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it’s very painful.
My mother taught me about the power of inspiration and courage, and she did it with a strength and a passion that I wish could be bottled.
It neither is reason nor in any wise to be suffered that the young king, our master and kinsman, should be in the hands of custody of his mother’s kindred, sequestered in great measure from our company and attendance, the which is neither honorable to his majesty nor unto us.
You have doubtless heard, my dear mother, the misfortune of Madame de Chartres, whose child is born dead. But I would rather have even that, terrible as it is, than be as I am without hope of any children.
Shortly after I was born he emigrated to Durban, where members of my mother’s family had settled at the turn of the century, and the rest of the family followed soon thereafter.
The great lesson my mother and father gave me was almost invisible. It was a strong sense of being rooted.
Among her many accomplishments, my mother is often identified as the leader of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday movement.
Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.
My mother had me when she was 15. My father died before I was born. So my mother was a teenage widow, and she used herself as her greatest example so I wouldn’t end up in her position.
Dad correctly said to me, ‘Gina, you’ll rue the day if I let you take your mother’s shares for the benefit of the children.’ He was right.
Fear is the mother of foresight.
A people’s relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.
They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.
My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father’s head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.
There’s something about compassion that causes society to say, ‘We’re going to take this person seriously.’ Take Mother Teresa. She was confrontational on abortion, but she wasn’t rejected by society.
My mother is a big believer in being responsible for your own happiness. She always talked about finding joy in small moments and insisted that we stop and take in the beauty of an ordinary day. When I stop the car to make my kids really see a sunset, I hear my mother’s voice and smile.
I am less selfish. But I am more insistent on being part of the creative experience. I find I am a better mother, lover and wife when I am writing. When my daughter was small I wasn’t writing as much and I didn’t miss it.
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
My mother would kill me if I posed nude! My mother raised me with certain standards.
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
I’ve just had some bad news. Tomorrow is the mother in law’s funeral. And she’s cancelled it.
If I’d seen a grown man beating a crippled boy, of course I’d intervene. If my father died and left my mother destitute, it’s your instinct to take care of her. So when I started to think about it in those terms, it started to make sense to me.
Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged.
Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.
There was never a great man who had not a great mother.
If you’ve ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it’s just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it’s not.
