Mother and Motherhood

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; Tomorrow ’ill be the happiest time of all the glad New Year; Of all the glad New Year, mother, the maddest, merriest day; For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

 

[ Remarks at debate, University of Stockholm, 1957 :] I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier . Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday. L’Étranger (The Stranger) pt. 1, ch. 1 (1942)

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

Younger than she are happy mothers made.

 

France, mother of arts, of warfare, and of laws.

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

Mama, take this badge off of me

Our house has never been anything but a play-room. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child. And the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.

If you and your child were going to be lulled tomorrow/would you not give him to eat today?

A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.

Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.

I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers / If I belittle dogs and mothers.

His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arched before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.

Now, we’ve made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

All the critics in the world may say it’s good but a man’s own mother will know.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols—all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child’s authentic self to a parent’s needs.

[ Helmer :] First and foremost, you are a wife and mother.

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

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.

When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women.