Mother Quotes

"As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose"

Clarence Darrow, Lawyer

"My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive"

Gwyneth Paltrow, Actress

"My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father"

Charles Kuralt, Journalist

"I sit there pouring out my woes year after year, coming up with one enormity after another about my mother and the way she let me down; but it doesn't make me any the less fearful"

Lars von Trier, Director

"My father was a classical musician and my mother was a writer"

John Sebastian, Musician

"It takes as much discipline to be a mother and a wife as it does to do anything else"

Suzanne Vega, Musician

"How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names"

Alice Walker, Author

"I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave"

Spalding Gray, Actor

"My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It's my mother's ambition to be a celebrity"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"I am no mother, and I won't be one"

Brigitte Bardot, Actress

"No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war"

Phyllis Schlafly, Activist

"We found that when people put this issue on the table, it turns out that men acknowledge the issue, and employers and employees can work out solutions just as working mothers do"

James Levine, Musician

"I don't think I would have been a good mother. Being a parent brings immense responsibility. It's a Herculean task. It would be almost too much for me"

Julie Christie, Actress

"So, the total number of hours spent on the stuff you have to do to take care of a family, working and caring for stuff at home, the total number of hours is actually about the same for mothers and fathers"

James Levine, Musician

"I have a brother younger than me. My mother was a librarian, so from her, I got the taste to read"

Shimon Peres, Statesman

"And when we used to play and fight in the streets in Brooklyn and I would get hurt or something, my mother would always come out and save me. So that sort of postponed the inevitable about getting a good beating, without having somebody to come and save you"

Sanford I. Weill, Businessman

"My mother really didn't know a heck of a lot about business. She was a very good mother, that made sure we ate right and we had our cod liver oil, but didn't know a heck of a lot about what I did"

Sanford I. Weill, Businessman

"What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother"

Phyllis Schlafly, Activist

"In the beginning, my mother humored me when I told her I wanted to be a reporter"

Jessica Savitch, Journalist

"I mean, if somebody said to me, junior year of college, you can go anywhere, your old man's paying for it, I'd have been gone in a flash. But I had to work. Every summer my mother would say, 'Get that job and hold on to it until August 30.'"

Chris Matthews, Journalist

"My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything"

Carly Simon, Musician

"I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It's chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one"

Paul Simon, Musician

"I haven't wanted to play a mother for a long time because I am one"

Frances McDormand, Actress

"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"

Carly Fiorina, Businessman

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid"

James D. Watson, Scientist

"I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society"

Charles Kuralt, Journalist

"And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read"

Alice Walker, Author

"Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me"

Alice Walker, Author

"To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people"

Alice Walker, Author

"My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It's just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she's the daughter of alcoholics who'd leave her alone at Christmas time"

Jim Carrey, Comedian

"Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged"

Louisa May Alcott, Novelist

"What do girls do who haven't any mothers to help them through their troubles?"

Louisa May Alcott, Novelist

"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"

Elvis Presley, Musician

"Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions"

Edward Coke, Businessman

"I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers, If I belittle dogs and mothers"

Ogden Nash, Poet

"If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies"

William Faulkner, Novelist

"I used to draw a lot. If my mother would ask me to do something else, I'd have a hairy conniption. I'd just go crazy"

Jim Carrey, Comedian

"I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course"

Jim Carrey, Comedian

"My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day"

Angela Carter, Novelist

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