Mother and Motherhood

I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was, “the man goes on top and the woman underneath.” For three years my husband and I slept on bunk beds.

I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother’s, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player’s arm movement.

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.

My mother hated me. Once she took me to an orphanage and told me to mingle.

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.

High people, Sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you’ll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other women.

If I were damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine.

Come mothers and fathers,

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

Men are what their mothers made them.

There never was a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get asleep.

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.

I wondered--not for the first time--whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one's own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one's aging mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one's responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted?