Motherhood Quotes

#1. However motherhood comes to you, it's a miracle. #Quote by Valerie Harper

#2. I also understood why my mom wasn't into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice. #Quote by Ali Wong

#3. You don't get your prebaby body back, ever, because you cannot go back to being a person who hasn't had a baby. Because you had a baby. #Quote by Wednesday Martin

#4. The women we become after children, she typed, then stopped to adjust the angle of the paper....We change shape, she continued, we buy low-heeled shoes, we cut off our long hair, We begin to carry in our bags half-eaten rusks, a small tractor, a shred of beloved fabric, a plastic doll. We lose muscle tone, sleep, reason, persoective. Our hearts begin to live outside our bodies. They breathe, they eat, they crawl and-look!-they walk, they begin to speak to us. We learn that we must sometimes walk an inch at a time, to stop and examine every stick, every stone, every squashed tin along the way. We get used to not getting where we were going. We learn to darn, perhaps to cook, to patch knees of dungarees. We get used to living with a love that suffuses us, suffocates us, blinds us, controls us. We live, We contemplate our bodies, our stretched skin, those threads of silver around our brows, our strangely enlarged feet. We learn to look less in the mirror. We put our dry-clean-only clothes to the back of the wardrobe. Eventually we throw them away. We school ourselves to stop saying 'shit' and 'damn' and learn to say 'my goodness' and 'heavens above.' We give up smoking, we color our hair, we search the vistas of parks, swimming-pools, libraries, cafes for others of our kind. We know each other by our pushchairs, our sleepless gazes, the beakers we carry. We learn how to cool a fever, ease a cough, the four indicators of meningitis, that one must sometimes push a swing for two ho #Quote by Maggie O'Farrell

#5. My arrival
Her womb's delight
Her existence
My living light
Her wounds
My scars
Her skies
My stars
Her days
My hours
Her strength
My powers
I breathe my name
Being her child
Without mother
Life's beguiled
From the poem 'Mother #Quote by Munia Khan

#6. There is only one thing worse than a little baby who won't stop crying: it is a big baby who won't stop whining about it #Quote by Agona Apell

#7. I'm a way bigger worrier than I ever was before I had kids. And, you know, the stress and anxiety that can go along with motherhood, I have had to battle that. #Quote by Natalie Maines

#8. American culture at large has failed working mothers. #Quote by Emily Matchar

#9. What do girls do who haven't any mothers to help them through their troubles? #Quote by Louisa May Alcott

#10. In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country. #Quote by Diana Trilling

#11. As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up. #Quote by Arlie Russell Hochschild

#12. You're only as happy as your least happy child,' is the best description of motherhood I have ever read. #Quote by Sarah Payne Stuart

#13. None of us have ever asked the men for anything, Agata states. Not a single thing, not even for the salt to be passed, not even for a penny or a moment alone or to take the washing in or to open a curtain or to go easy on the small yearlings or to put your hand on the small of my back as I try, again, for the twelfth or thirteenth time, to push a baby out of my body. #Quote by Miriam Toews

#14. If only we lived in a culture in which internal measures of satisfaction and success - a capacity for joy and caring, an ability to laugh, a sense of connection to others, a belief in social justice - were as highly valued as external measures. If only we lived in a culture that made ambition compatible with motherhood and family life, that presented models of women who were integrated and whole: strong, sexual, ambitious, cued into their own varied appetites and demands, and equipped with the freedom and resources to explore all of them. If only women felt less isolated in their frustration and fatigue, less torn between competing hungers, less compelled to keep nine balls in the air at once, and less prone to blame themselves when those balls come crashing to the floor. If only we exercised our own power, which is considerable but woefully underused; if only we defined desire on our own terms. And - painfully, truly - if only we didn't care so much about how we looked, how much we weighed, what we wore. #Quote by Caroline Knapp

#15. Women wear many hats in their lives. Daughter, sister, student, breadwinner. But no matter where we are or what we're doing, one hat that moms never take off is the crown of motherhood. There is no crown more glorious. #Quote by Ann Romney

#16. The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care. #Quote by Anna Quindlen

#17. Our ability to choose is sacred. It's what makes humans special. #Quote by Mark Andrew Poe

#18. Always-
the sharp,
plaintive edge
on the rim
of the spoon
of my giving.
(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions') #Quote by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

#19. We are meant to be deeply affected and changed by motherhood. We are meant to be softened, humbled, reshaped, repurposed, and made wiser. We're meant to grow, heal, and transform for the good of us all and toward the mother-led consciousness we've been blessed with the honor of birthing. #Quote by Beth Berry

#20. She supposed this was the real definition of a mother – a woman who willingly allows her heart to break over and over again for her children. #Quote by Rhian J. Martin

#21. I have stretch marks on my heart. #Quote by Bella Bloom

#22. Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways. #Quote by Jodi Picoult

#23. A virtuous mother sows and sows seeds of greatness with great life in mind. #Quote by Jaachynma N.E. Agu

#24. I surely know that there is no role in life more essential and more eternal than that of motherhood. #Quote by M. Russell Ballard

#25. I realized that it was not Ko-san, now safely ditched for ever, but Ko-san's mother who stood in need of pity and consideration. She must still live on in this hard unpitying world, but he, once he had jumped [in battle], had jumped beyond such things. The case could well have been different, had he never jumped; but he did jump; and that, as they say, is that. Whether this world's weather turns out fine or cloudy no more worries him; but it matters to his mother. It rains, so she sits alone indoors thinking about Ko-san. And now it's fine, so she potters out and meets a friend of Ko-san's. She hangs out the national flag to welcome the returned soliders, but her joy is made querulous with wishing that Ko-san were alive. At the public bath-house, some young girl of marriageable age helps her to carry a bucket of hot water: but her pleasure from that kindness is soured as she thinks if only I had a daughter-in-law like this girl. To live under such conditions is to live in agonies. Had she lost one out of many children, there would be consolation and comfort in the mere fact of the survivors. But when loss halves a family of just one parent and one child, the damage is as irreparable as when a gourd is broken clean across its middle. There's nothing left to hang on to. Like the sergeant's mother, she too had waited for her son's return, counting on shriveled fingers the passing of the days and nights before that special day when she would be able once more to hang on him. But #Quote by Natsume Sōseki

#26. Mothers are likely to have more bad days on the job than most other professionals, considering the hours: round-the-clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year ... You go to work when you're sick, maybe even clinically depressed, because motherhood is perhaps the only unpaid position where failure to show up can result in arrest. #Quote by Mary Blakely

#27. I remember the shift that occurred after Abby was born - there'd been the great big before, where dying grandparents and natural disasters on the news were sad but mostly distant concerns. But then I became a mother, and when that happens, you cross a line that makes all loss a crushing, personal matter. #Quote by DEB CALLETI

#28. This is motherhood for you,' said my own mother. 'Going through life with your heart outside your body. #Quote by Jennifer Weiner

#29. WANTING to be anything is the whole point of feminism. HAVING TO BE SOMETHING is what feminists fight against, or at least the ones I know. #Quote by Alida Nugent

#30. Women are responsible for the people in the family having pants. #Quote by Heidi Julavits

#31. Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions. #Quote by Nancy Stahl

#32. She goes silent. Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters than their daughters want from them. #Quote by Fredrik Backman

#33. Listen kid, it's just you and me now, so let's help each other out. Always be honest with me, and show me how to be the mother and father I never had. I'll make a mess of things sometimes, and I'm sorry in advance, but I'll try. My word is bond. #Quote by Raquel Cepeda

#34. Say something to it, he said.

As I looked at the baby, I felt nothing taking shape in mind or mouth. I had no idea what the sort of things were that somebody would say to a baby. I had no idea why anyone would say anything to a baby. I held it carefully, as one would a sack of apples. And then, with him watching me, nodding encouragingly, I began to say to it, for lack of anything else to say, all the words I had ever known, in order. #Quote by Alexandra Kleeman

#35. The phrase "working mother" is redundant. #Quote by Jane Sellman

#36. This is part of the essence of motherhood, watching your kid grow into her own person and not being able to do anything about it. Otherwise children would be nothing more than pets. #Quote by Heather Armstrong

#37. Combining paid employment with marriage and motherhood creates safeguards for emotional well-being. Nothing is certain in life, but generally the chances of happiness are greater if one has multiple areas of interest and involvement. To juggle is to diminish the risk of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness. #Quote by Faye J Crosby

#38. There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met. #Quote by Jodi Picoult

#39. Talk to her about sex, and start early. It will probably be a bit awkward, but it is necessary. #Quote by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#40. Thinking about adults putting on a happy face for children, or worse, being unable to put on the happy face, is devastating. That we maintain this dishonesty with them, that we must. I have a longing to protect the kids from coming into some consciousness of the fact that taking care of them is difficult. I always imagined that keeping that fact from them was an essential part of good mothering. #Quote by Nina Renata Aron

#41. Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality. #Quote by Henry Ward Beecher

#42. And it's a girl. And you will love her more than you love yourself. And you'll disappoint her, too - and never live up to the standards you set for yourself. But don't worry. She'll be okay. #Quote by Katherine Center

#43. There is no greater good in all the world than motherhood. The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation. #Quote by James E. Faust

#44. Necessity, mother of invention. #Quote by William Wycherley

#45. 1. Motherhood is hard
2. Motherhood is glorious
3. Motherhood is hard #Quote by Lisa-Jo Baker

#46. The balancing act of motherhood and a career, and being a wife, is something that I don't think I'll ever perfect, but I love the challenge of it. #Quote by Kerri Walsh

#47. 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. #Quote by Nancy E. Turner

#48. What kind of choice is it, really, when motherhood forces you into a delicate balancing act
not just between work and family, as the equation is typically phrased, but between your premotherhood and postmotherhood identities? What kind of choice is it when you have to choose between becoming a mother and remaining yourself? #Quote by Judith Warner

#49. The only way to break the cycle of unwed motherhood, fatherless children, poverty, crime, and welfare is to recognize that welfare causes more problems than it cures. #Quote by David Boaz

#50. Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is place in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no others hands the sacred and holy trust given to her. #Quote by J.R. Miller

#51. Unless women have, from the moment of birth, socialization for, expectations of, and preparation for a viable significant alternative to motherhood ... women will continue to want and reproduce too many children. #Quote by Wilma Scott Heide

#52. dear mother,

our daughters watch us
to see what they'll be expected to be
and our sons watch us
to see what they'll be able to get away with #Quote by Bunmi Laditan

#53. Those who have taken a rather more pragmatic and individualist position on not having children tend to talk directly in terms of personal fulfillment. They have made a choice to live their lives in a particular way, associating motherhood with burden and loss - of freedom, energy, money, pleasure, intimacy, and even identity. A child is synonymous with sacrifice and frustrating, even repellent, obligations; it is perhaps a threat to the stability and happiness of one's relationships. They refer to themselves as "child-free" rather than childless because they are free of children and therefore of motherhood. #Quote by Elisabeth Badinter

#54. Now that I'm experiencing motherhood, I'm ready to write the next chapter of my family story. Of course a few jaded folks in the press corps will claim I ran out of money or just want to kiss John Corbett again. One of these things is true. #Quote by Nia Vardalos

#55. Mothers are the necessity of invention. #Quote by Bill Watterson

#56. The first thing [in career and motherhood] is a great husband. That I found many years ago and I am lucky in that way. #Quote by Meryl Streep

#57. He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in the darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#58. Out of all the things I do, I think being a mom is the most important and satisfying. #Quote by Michelle M. Pillow

#59. It's sad if people think that's (homemaking) a dull existance, [but] you can't just buy an apartment and furnish it and walk away. It's the flowers you choose, the music you play, the smile you have waiting. I want it to be gay and cheerful, a haven in this troubled world. I don't want my husband and children to come home and find a rattled woman. Our era is already rattled enough, isn't it? #Quote by Audrey Hepburn

#60. I felt like God was giving me a chance to assist in a miracle. There is something so relieving about life taking over you like that. You're playing a part in a much bigger show. And that's what life is. It's the greatest show on earth. #Quote by Beyonce Knowles

#61. Motherhood is a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender is. It's enormous. #Quote by Anne-Marie Slaughter

#62. Mary considers how the womb stirs and years for its children, even after they have grown and gone off to other lives. The womb remembers. The womb knows how to weep. #Quote by Walter Wangerin Jr.

#63. Isolation can be a particular problem for mothers at home with small children. Mothers become isolated from each other because we fear judgement. Other mothers can be our harshest critics. And we anticipate that criticism and don't ask each other for help. #Quote by Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

#64. No mom has it all together. We're all dealing with loose ends when it comes to motherhood and our children. Some of us are just better at keeping up appearances, that's all. #Quote by Julie Ann Barnhill

#65. That means you're my kid," I explained, "and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so. #Quote by Barbara Kingsolver

#66. I feel awful for women who are trying to raise kids on their own, with zero income and no fathers present - that's single motherhood. #Quote by Natascha McElhone

#67. To be a mother is a woman's greatest vocation in life. She is a partner with God. No being has a position of such power and influence. She holds in her hands the destiny of nations, for to her comes the responsibility and opportunity of molding the nation's citizens. #Quote by Spencer W. Kimball

#68. The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.' If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one's undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I lover her very much? #Quote by Maggie Nelson

#69. Daphne Bridgerton, I don't - "
" - like my tone, I know." Daphne grinned. "But you love me."
Violet smiled warmly and wrapped an arm around Daphne's shoulder. "Heaven help me, I do."
Daphne gave her mother a quick peck on the cheek. "It's the curse of motherhood. You're required to love us even when we vex you."
Violet just sighed. "I hope that someday you have children - "
" - just like me, I know." Daphne smiled nostalgically and rested her head on her mother's shoulder. Her mother could be overly inquisitive, and her father had been more interested in hounds and hunting than he'd been in society affairs, but theirs had been a warm marriage, filled with love, laughter, and children. "I could do a great deal worse than follow your example, Mother," she murmured. #Quote by Julia Quinn

#70. Like every mother, my wish - every birthday - is for my children to stay healthy (and) for my family to remain healthy. #Quote by Angelina Jolie

#71. Being an almost mother isn't a thing. You have seven children, whether they made it here or not doesn't take away from the fact they existed. They were yours, and they were loved fully if only for those small moments.
You are a mother, Grace. I am so, so sorry you were never able to hold your babies, but you are, and always will be, a mother. #Quote by Brittainy C. Cherry

#72. It used to be almost the first question (just after 'Can you type?') in the standard female job interview: 'Are you now, or have you ever, contemplated marriage, motherhood, or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government? #Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

#73. The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous. #Quote by Anna Quindlen

#74. A wise mother is the unifying force between father and children; her seed of love produces a harvest of trust. #Quote by Jaachynma N.E. Agu

#75. Motherhood is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love, you can get a puppy. #Quote by Barbara Walters

#76. She's wonderful and soulful. She has a sly sense of humor. I've seen her deliver a funnier joke with a single silent raise of her eyebrow than many stand up comedians. She guards a very sensitive heart. Any human suffering brings her to tears. She's smart. Talk down to her and find yourself mentally slapped. She's an excellent judge of character, and seems to know an original spirit from a forgery every time. Cross boundaries with her...in any improper way and suffer the wrath of a lion. ... She's principled and firm. Rude behavior doesn't materialize in her presence. She's a grown-up who fully sees and knows children as citizens, and people, and souls. And because she respects children, all children seem to respect her. #Quote by Shonda Rhimes

#77. It is a mother's noble conceit to believe she has the power to take her child's suffering and do it for him. #Quote by Kadiatou Diallo

#78. My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression. #Quote by Sue Monk Kidd

#79. When we encourage new parents to 'treasure these moments because they don't last forever' we need to remember to also reassure them that they will survive these moments because they don't last forever.
Parenting is hard, and the struggles can sometimes feel like they overshadow the joys. Knowing that struggling is normal and will pass helps us get through the hard times so we can truly treasure the good ones. #Quote by L.R. Knost

#80. Mothers give us life, love, and the heartfelt inclination to cry 'I want my mommy' no matter how old we get. #Quote by Richelle E. Goodrich

#81. She sacrifices her dreams to make my dream come true. #Quote by Luffina Lourduraj

#82. The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. #Quote by Mike Wallace

#83. We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child. #Quote by Doris Lessing

#84. Men like to flirt with, and sometimes even date a wild child, but those women aren't usually first on their lists for marriage or motherhood. #Quote by Nancy Leigh DeMoss

#85. My god
is frozen-mouth. She is get-out-of-this-town-

or-hell-freezes-over. She is paycheck
to paycheck. Each night when she goes to bed, my god

kisses her kids' clean faces, then, thanking herself, her own. #Quote by Jennifer Givhan

#86. We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them. #Quote by Dora Russell

#87. What is certain is that he [the baby] has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him. #Quote by Germaine Greer

#88. I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself. #Quote by Jodi Picoult

#89. There is an unspoken pact that women are supposed to follow. I am supposed to act like I constantly feel guilty about being away from my kids. (I don't. I love my job.) Mothers who stay at home are supposed to pretend they are bored and wish they were doing more corporate things. (They don't. They love their job.) If we all stick to the plan there will be less blood in the streets. #Quote by Amy Poehler

#90. Right now, after giving birth, I really understand the power of my body. I just feel my body means something completely different. #Quote by Beyonce Knowles

#91. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. #Quote by C.S. Lewis

#92. Whomsoever embraces their creativity along with their individuality, embraces all possibility deep within. #Quote by H. L. Balcomb

#93. Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse. #Quote by Rebecca West

#94. I have these two different images of her etched into my memory: one as this idealized mother, and the other as a sort of pressure weighing down on me - obsessive, feminine love. #Quote by Banana Yoshimoto

#95. I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise? #Quote by Rebecca Solnit

#96. Real women have children, wise women choose for themselves. #Quote by Karin Rahbek

#97. Do you want me? I am yours. #Quote by Mark Andrew Poe

#98. Motherhood informs my work 100 per cent. #Quote by Jessica Marais

#99. It's tough being AWESOME all the time, but the kids need someone to look up to! #Quote by Tanya Masse

#100. So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things. #Quote by Johannes Kepler

#101. She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos. #Quote by Nicole Krauss

#102. If something happened to Gillian, I'd rip the world down to save her, even if she spat in my face when I did. That's what parenthood means. #Quote by Seanan McGuire

#103. I always thought my mother was so damn cute! #Quote by Kate Hudson

#104. It's true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good. #Quote by Rivka Galchen

#105. It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love? #Quote by Celeste Ng

#106. Let us acknowledge the magnitude of Motherhood, by simply honoring all mothers - past & present. #Quote by Eleesha

#107. Sisterhood - that is, primary and bonding love from women - is, like motherhood, a capacity, not a destiny. It must be chosen, exercised by acts of will. #Quote by Olga Broumas

#108. Motherhood is when eating chicken soup; the kids get the chicken and you get the soup and you would still feel happily stuffed. #Quote by Sandra Chami Kassis

#109. Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention. #Quote by Margaret Mead

#110. I quite liked having a baby - I think I won't put it more strongly than that. But I had no intention of allowing motherhood to disrupt my work as an archeologist. #Quote by Mary Leakey

#111. Women who miscalculate are called mothers. #Quote by Abigail Van Buren

#112. I think I would scream too if someone violently jammed a big ass breast in my mouth. #Quote by Cassi Clark

#113. Whether outside work is done by choice or not, whether women seek their identity through work, whether women are searching for pleasure or survival through work, the integration of motherhood and the world of work is a source of ambivalence, struggle, and conflict for the great majority of women. #Quote by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

#114. My most important title is still "mom-in-chief." My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world. #Quote by Michelle Obama

#115. She'd once read a description of new motherhood that had struck her, at the time that she was returning to work after maxing out her maternity leave allowance, as a beautiful metaphor for her own days back at the office. It was that mother and baby are like a ball of yarn, and when the mother leaves the baby's side, it's as if the baby grabs hold of the loose end, a tug that both mother and baby feel in their every fiber. As they both move through the hours spent apart, the string unravels more and more, and then just when each is starting to feel diminished, barely even a ball of yarn at all anymore, it's time for the mother to make her way back. Together again, they need only a bit of time to wind the string back up, and then it's as if they had never been apart, right up until they wake up and do it all over again. #Quote by Jessica Strawser

#116. I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither. #Quote by William Trevor

#117. Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#118. Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either. #Quote by Jodi Picoult

#119. The mother ... swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood. #Quote by Victor Hugo

#120. The joy in motherhood comes in moments. There will be hard times and frustrating times, but amid the challenges there are shining moments of joy and satisfaction. #Quote by M. Russell Ballard

#121. What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetrated on women and designated to further men's lives at the expense of their own. #Quote by C.E. Morgan

#122. Motherhood makes you stronger even as it makes you weaker. Your new sensitivity is a strength, and you should see it that way. #Quote by Beth Ann Fennelly

#123. Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done. #Quote by Rebecca Woolf

#124. Do without if you need to, but don't do without mother. #Quote by H. Burke Peterson

#125. When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult. #Quote by Emily Matchar

#126. True motherhood is the noblest call of the world, and we look with sorrow upon the practice here in our own United States of limiting families, a tendency creeping into our own Church. #Quote by David O. McKay

#127. Everything we did was a first: first bath, first walk, first drive in the car. It was like we walked into an alternate universe that looked just like the old one, but all the rules were different and we had to relearn how to live. #Quote by Soleil Moon Frye

#128. Beguiling voices in the world cry out for 'alternative lifestyles' for women. They maintain that some women are better suited for careers than for marriage and motherhood. #Quote by Ezra Taft Benson

#129. Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don't get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives. #Quote by Bella Pollen

#130. The bond between a mother and daughter is sacred. You know better than anyone that no matter how awful they are, we still find it in our hearts to love them. #Quote by Stephanie Wrobel

#131. There seems to be a hole in the culture where mothers went. Then, when their kids went off to school or stopped having ear infections every three weeks, they emerged from the mother zone, and like everyone else, they forgot where they'd been. Amnesia surrounding motherhood is the rule, not the exception. #Quote by Marni Jackson

#132. If you're like us -mothers with an attitude problem- you may be getting increasingly irritable about this chasm between the ridiculous, honey-hued ideals of perfect motherhood in the mass media and the reality of mothers' everyday lives. #Quote by Susan Douglas

#133. the big problem with motherhood of girls, it seems to me, is that we're both women. #Quote by Elizabeth Noble

#134. A Real Mom:
Emotional, yet the rock.
Tired, but keeps going.
Worried, but full of hope.
Impatient, yet patient.
Overwhelmed, but never quits.
Amazing, even though doubted.
Wonderful, even in the chaos.
Life changer, every single day. #Quote by Rachel Marie Martin

#135. No one who traces the history of motherhood, of the home, of child-rearing practices will ever assume the eternal permanence of our own way of institutionalizing them. #Quote by Jessie Bernard

#136. There is so much awesome in just being you. #Quote by Rachel Marie Martin

#137. Then when she really thought about it she realized she'd been becoming different people for as long as she could remember but had never really noticed, or had put it down to moods, or marriage, or motherhood. The problem was that she'd thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product. #Quote by Anna Quindlen

#138. I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now. #Quote by Anna Quindlen

#139. I don't give up on people, even when they give up on me. #Quote by Mark Andrew Poe

#140. No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories. #Quote by Alice Walker

#141. How's motherhood? It is absolutely wonderful. Oh, my gosh. It's truly indescribable and amazing. #Quote by Jennie Finch

#142. You Might Not Be A Wife Material,
Neither Might You Be Worth Mothering
Anyone's Child, According To PEOPLE.
You Are However ENOUGH To Make God Leave His Throne And Come Down To Earth To Change Your Situation.
You Are ENOUGH To Make Mary Virgin Again For Your Worth To Be Seen Not By The Naked Eye.
You Are ENOUGH To Reverse The Curse Of Adam And Eve For God To Redeem You.
You Are ENOUGH, My Sister,
For Jesus To Be Crucified Again,
Just For God To Refill Your Cup. #Quote by Nomthandazo Tsembeni

#143. Know that every mother occasionally feels "at the end of her rope." When you reach the end of your rope, don't add guilt to your frustration. No one said motherhood was going to be easy. #Quote by Heather King

#144. The ancient savagery that men call motherhood, who mistake its tenderness for weakness. #Quote by Diana Gabaldon

#145. The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, in some instances even her health, her wealth.
Are all these really selfless states, however? Are these acts of morality miracles because they are, to use Schopenhauer's phrase, 'impossible and yet real'? Isn't it clear that, in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#146. Her intimate, edgy sculpture was grounded in female experience, including relationships, giving birth and motherhood. #Quote by Jan Greenberg

#147. God intended motherhood to be a relay race. Each generation would pass the baton on to the next. #Quote by Mary Pride

#148. Motherhood is hard enough without judgement from others who don't know the whole story. #Quote by Sarah Addison Allen

#149. Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit. #Quote by Jodi Picoult

#150. There is a particular quality of quietude and stillness that suffuses these painterly poems of Carol Ann Davis, so involved with loss, motherhood and the shifting tonalities of light that transform the domestic and ordinary into the strange and extraordinary that, combined with tenderness of address, approach the worshipful and make a number of these poems so moving and distinctive. #Quote by August Kleinzahler

#151. Maybe motherhood means honoring one's mother. #Quote by Sheila Heti

#152. In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us. #Quote by Erica Jong

#153. And since we're all adults here, let's be brutally honest-most babies are not actually attractive. In fact, they're weird and freakish looking. A large percentage of them are squinty-eyed and bald and their faces are all mushed toegther, kind of like Renee Zellweger pushed up against a glass window. #Quote by Joan Rivers

#154. I wonder who in their right mind thought I was mature enough for this: motherhood, home ownership, a career, adulthood in general. I hope I have them all fooled, that I have any clue at all what I'm doing. #Quote by Cassandra Dunn

#155. [the] special relation of women to children, in which the heart of the world has always felt there was something sacred, serves to impress upon women certain tendencies, to endow them with certain virtueswhich will render them of special value in public affairs. #Quote by Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

#156. There would be,
half a million things,
I could do,
yet I don't know,
what would be so?

When I will see you,
for the first time,
calm, twined in your
daddy's arm,
coming towards me,
I could do,
half a million things-
caress your skin,
fondle your chin,
stroke though your limbs,
smoothly touch your lips,
and make my silent wishes,
for your health and,
your intellect.

Half a million things,
I could do,
yet I don't know,
what would be so?

When I will see you,
for the first time,
I could say,
half a million things-
call you my kid,
read a fine script,
whisper love in your ears,
sing a hymn.

Half a million things,
I could say,
yet I don't know,
what would be so?

I fear though,
what if I am unable to,
do any of this,
and all I end up with,
is,
just a knot of tears,
loaded with,
some of the most pure prayers,
I have ever chaired.

Half a million things,
I could do and
I could say,
yet when it happens,
little will my practice play.

Half a million things,
and I wouldn't know,
how and where one begins. #Quote by Jasleen Kaur Gumber

#157. Our baby gives herself to me completely. There is no hesitation, no reservation, no holding back, no coldness, no craft, no tremor or fear in her love. Although our relationship may encompass tears, frustration, even fury, it is an utterly reliable bond. As it grows, her love is literally unadulterated. Her love is wholly of the child, pure in its essence as children are in their direct passions. Children do not love wisely, but perhaps they love the best of all. #Quote by Louise Erdrich

#158. I believe motherhood will be the seminal event in your life. You will find it in turns gratifying, frustrating, amazing, and overwhelming. It will be the most marvelous, challenging, vital role you'll ever play. " 'Someone once told me, "As mothers, our job is not to raise children, but to raise adults. #Quote by Lori Nelson Spielman

#159. Now that Olive was grown, I didn't know what to do with myself. You could build your life around one single thing, like a view or a child, but that was risky. You had so much to lose. #Quote by Michael Lee West

#160. Motherhood rarely allows for solitude, yet it begets its own kind of isolation: from one's past, from one's youth, from the women we once thought we were and would become. #Quote by Hannah Nordhaus

#161. They hate me because I am the worst thing possible. I am the bad mother.

But here's a secret: in America there are no good mothers. They simply don't exist. Always, there are a thousand ways to fail at this singularly important job. There are failures of the body and failures of the heart. The woman who is unable to breastfeed is a failure. The woman who screams for the epidural is a failure. The woman who picks up her child late knows from the teacher's cutting glance that she is a failure. The woman who shares her bed with her baby has failed. The woman who steels herself and puts on noise-canceling earphones to erase the screaming of her child the next room has failed just as spectacularly. They must all hang their heads in guilt and shame because they haven't done it perfectly, and motherhood is, if anything, the assumption of perfection. #Quote by Nayomi Munaweera

#162. The most consistent gift and burden of motherhood is advice. #Quote by Susan Chira

#163. New mothers enter the world of parenting feeling much like Alice in Wonderland.
- Being a mother is one of the most rewarding jobs on earth and also one of the most challenging.
- Motherhood is a process. Learn to love the process.
- There is a tremendous amount of learning that takes place in the first year of your baby's life; the baby learns a lot, too.
- It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the fantasy of what you thuoght motherhood would be like, and what you thought you would be like as a mother, with reality.
- Take care of yourself. If Mommy isn't happy, no one else in the family is happy either.
- New mother generally need to lower their expectations.
- A good mother learns to love her child as he is and adjusts her mothering to suit her child. #Quote by Debra Gilbert Rosenberg

#164. I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand. #Quote by Wendell Berry

#165. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man. #Quote by Walt Whitman

#166. I've been melted into something
too easy to spill. I make more
and more of myself in order
to make more and more of the baby.
He takes it, this making. And somehow
he's made more of me, too. #Quote by Brenda Shaughnessy

#167. Ideas about mothers have swung historically with the roles of women. When women were needed to work the fields or shops, experts claimed that children didn't need them much. Mothers, who might be too soft and sentimental, could even be bad for children's character development. But when men left home during the Industrial Revolution to work elsewhere, women were "needed" at home. The cult of domesticity and motherhood became a virtue that kept women in their place. #Quote by Sandra Scarr

#168. Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers ... but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do. #Quote by Erica Jong

#169. I could not get my fill of looking.
There should be a song for women to sing at this moment or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name that moment. #Quote by Anita Diamant

#170. With my family, I'm trying to raise them to have respect for all people and make friends around the world and feel at home with the world and really live a truly global [life] because I think it's what forms them and it's really important to me. #Quote by Angelina Jolie

#171. Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation. #Quote by Antonella Gambotto-Burke

#172. Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden heart's desires. Life, art, motherhood. Love and the great seductive promise that I wasn't nothing. That I could be seen for my unvarnished self, and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could, that indeed she must, leave a trace upon the world. #Quote by Claire Messud

#173. The best part of having two babies at once, a son and a daughter, is mostly everything. You're just having that feeling of love inside you all the time and motherhood is such a fulfilling place to be. I kind of wish it would have happened to me earlier in my life. #Quote by Jennifer Lopez

#174. Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids. #Quote by Marge Piercy

#175. You only confuse hope with power once in life. #Quote by Abby Fabiaschi

#176. Our children want more than presents, that want our PRESENCE. #Quote by Heather Schuck

#177. Young, new moms need coffee to survive. Older moms with teenagers need cocktails. #Quote by Sandra Lake

#178. Now in the thriving season of love
when the bud relents into flower,
your love turned absence has turned once more,
and if my comforts fall soft as rain
on her flutters, it is because
love grows by what it remembers of love #Quote by Lisel Mueller

#179. Why not wear a scar of Motherhood? Better than a tattoo or a mark of Honor. Let the world know what you've achieved. #Quote by Richelle Mead

#180. Why had no one told me that my body would become a battlefield, a sacrifice, a test? Why did I not know that birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers? But of course there is no way to tell this or to hear it. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you have no idea how death stands in the corner, ready to play his part. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you do not know the power that rises from other women-even strangers speaking an unknown tongue, invoking the names of unfamiliar goddesses. #Quote by Anita Diamant

#181. Don't write your child's pages. Turn them with love. #Quote by Mark Andrew Poe

#182. What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things. #Quote by Rachel Cusk

#183. Years later, I read that someone had found genetic components to good motherhood. The Mest and the Peg3 genes occur on chromosome 19, and, ironically, they only work if they're inherited from the father. Imprinting like this usually occurs in evolution because of a genetic battle of the sexes; it's in the best interests of the female to have more litters, but it's in the best interests of the male to protect the child that's already been born. The jury is still out on these #Quote by Jodi Picoult

#184. I mean, I'm just tired of being wrong all the time just because I'm a guy. I mean how many times can everybody tell you that you're the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy.
I mean a male, chauvinist pig isn't born, hes made, and more and more of them are being made by women. After long enough you just roll over and accept the fact that you're a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. Women are right. You're wrong.
You get used to the idea.
You live down to expectations.
Even if the shoe doesn't fit, you'll shrink to fill it.
I mean, in a world without god aren't mothers the new god? The last sacred unassailable position. Isn't motherhood the last perfect magical miracle? But a miracle that isn't possible for men, and maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses - any advantage men appear to have are pretty token.
You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus.
Women are already born so far ahead ability - wise. The day a men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights. #Quote by Chuck Palahniuk

#185. My mother used to tell me man gives the award, God gives the reward. I don't need another plaque. #Quote by Denzel Washington

#186. The fact is, no man can ever know whether a child is his. A woman knows a child is hers, but a man can never know whether it is his, not even with a DNA test. A DNA test can only tell you if the child is not yours, but if your DNA matches, it only indicates 'a high statistical probability' that it is your child. As they say, 'Motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a sociological fiction.' It is this knowledge that creates permanent anxiety for patriarchy, an anxiety that requires women's sexuality to be strictly policed. #Quote by Nivedita Menon

#187. With motherhood and marriage there was no finish line, no hour or day or year when you got to say you were through. Life just went on and on, endless and formless, with no performance evaluation, no raises or feedback or two weeks' vacation. #Quote by Jennifer Weiner

#188. The balding headstones
of the others - quarantined

from their own mothers & sisters & daughters -
I wondered if they, like us, were strange

alloys of sadness & forgetting
the words to the songs. #Quote by Jennifer Givhan

#189. Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears. #Quote by Honore De Balzac

#190. Still the most magical day of my life was the day I became a mom. #Quote by Linda Becker

#191. He'd unbuttoned his shirt so the night breeze would soothe him; his body always ran too hot. The blood. Too hot. The large, gold crucifix on his neck, dangling to his thick chest hairs, caught there, and winked in the candlelight. His childhood prayers. For food. Warmth. His beloved mother. That the cruelty of his father. Stop. No more. Beatings. He never. Stopped. Beating her. Mama. [...] Pompeii remembered - like tuning into a clear TV channel - his mother's gentle face. Her fingertips on his boy's face, calming him to sleep. The sound of his father's drunken entrance, when she would hold her breath, stop stroking his boy face. #Quote by Alma Luz Villanueva

#192. Being a mother can be like drying out the foundations of a house or mending a roof: it takes time, sweat, and money, and once it's done everything looks exactly the same as it did before. It's not the sort of thing anyone gives you praise for. #Quote by Fredrik Backman

#193. I am just blessed they are such great, really wonderful kids ... #Quote by Jennifer Connelly

#194. James Wilkie is so conscious of the time we spend together. I try to be home to tuck him in at least four nights a week, and if I'm not, he's not letting me get away with anything. The other night I was sitting with him on the steps before Matthew and I went out to the theater, and he looked at me and said, 'Mama, this has got to stop. Go upstairs and take that dress off.' #Quote by Sarah Jessica Parker

#195. The essence of motherhood is not restricted to women who have given birth; it is a principle inherent in both women and men. It is an attitude of the mind. It is love - and that love is the very breath of life. No one would say, 'I will breathe only when I am with my family and friends; I won't breathe in front of my enemies.' Similarly, for those in whom motherhood has awakened, love and compassion for everyone are as much part of their being as breathing. #Quote by Mata Amritanandamayi

#196. You're saying, "What the hell am I gonna do with her?" You're saying, "Shit, did she take her pills?" You're saying, "Once upon a time, I used to have a little girl. #Quote by Shannon Celebi

#197. Motherhood: if it were going to be easy, it never would have started with something called labor. #Quote by Barbara Johnson

#198. It can often happen that motherhood can really stop a lot of women in their tracks and I wanted to try and keep working through that as much as I could. #Quote by Martha Wainwright

#199. Moms, even good ones, sometimes lose it a little so as not to lose it all. #Quote by Susan Squire

#200. I have insecurities about being a good mom, or balancing my career with motherhood. All of those are very strong, very real obstacles. My motto is just unconsciously, and maybe now consciously because I'm saying it, is sink or swim. I'm a fighter. #Quote by Charisma Carpenter