Alice Walker:

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.

Amy Tan:

Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.

The Kitchen God's Wife

Annie Sullivan:

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

Ariel and Will Durant:

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

Aristotle:

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more,
I saw at last its meaning and its place;
Not the blind passion of the brooding past,
But Mother -- the World's Mother -- come at last,
To love as she had never loved before --
To feed and guard and teach the human race.

Chinese proverb:

One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.

Colette:

Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers.

Dorothy Parker:

The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.

Elaine Heffner:

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.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

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.

Aurora Leigh

Elizabeth Kenny:

My mother used to say, "He who angers you, conquers you!" But my mother was a saint.

Florida Scott-Maxwell:

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

Golda Meir:

At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis:

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.

Jane Welsh Carlyle:

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

Jill Bensley:

The most effective form of birth control I know is spending the day with my kids.

Marcia Muller:

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.

Margaret Sanger:

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

Margaret Sanger:

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

Marge Piercy:

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

Braided Lives

Marilyn French:

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Maureen Hawkins:

Before you were conceived I wanted you
Before you were born I loved you
Before you were here an hour I would die for you
This is the miracle of life.

Michael Levine:

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

Nancy Friday:

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

Nancy Friday:

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

Pamela Glenconner:

Bitter are the tears of a child: Sweeten them.
Deep are the thoughts of a child: Quiet them.
Sharp is the grief of a child: Take it from him.
Soft is the heart of a child: Do not harden it.

Pearl S. Buck:

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

Tenneva Jordan:

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.

Theodore Hesburgh:

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

Virginia Woolf:

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.