Education

Motherhood Quotes [2]

Quotations on Mothers and Motherhood (continued)

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• "By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class." -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

• "Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines." -- Amy Tan, in The Kitchen God's Wife

• "Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women's opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering." -- Elaine Heffner

• "God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is useful to the point of necessity when they are adolescents." -- Phyllis McGinley

• "Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter." -- Betty Rollin

• "If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much." -- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

• "I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it." -- Rose Kennedy

• "Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother." -- Jane Welsh Carlyle

• "A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary." -- Dorothy Canfield Fisher

• "She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions -- and in the end doing them irreparable harm." -- Marcia Muller

• "If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent." -- Bette Davis

• "Women who miscalculate are called mothers." -- Abigail Van Buren

• "Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs... since the payment is pure love." -- Mildred B. Vermont

• "Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them!" -- Margaret Mitchell

• "Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come." -- Louisa May Alcott, in Little Women, chapter 36

• "Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes
And stringing pretty words that make no sense."
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

• "Never marry a man who hates his mother, because he'll end up hating you." -- Jill Bennett

• "Spend at least one Mother's Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him." -- Erma Bombeck

• "It is not until you become a mother than your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding." -- Erma Bombeck

• "Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents-to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be." -- Ellen Galinsky

• "Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions -- requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs -- there was no attention given to preparation for this office." -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• "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's a wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick." -- Erma Bombeck

• "Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world." -- Kate Douglas Wiggin

• "Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate." -- Charlotte Gray

• "Motherhood brings as much joy as ever, but it still brings boredom, exhaustion, and sorrow too. Nothing else ever will make you as happy or as sad, as proud or as tired, for nothing is quite as hard as helping a person develop his own individuality especially while you struggle to keep your own." -- Marguerite Kelly and Elia Parsons

• "Giving kids clothes and food is one of thing, but it's much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people." -- Dolores Huerta

And from that prolific writer (possibly female!) who is called Unknown:

• "All mothers are working mothers." -- Unknown

• "A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother." -- Unknown