Quotes & Sayings About A Mother's Touch

He and Harmony had been wed a week now, and still the briefest glance at his wife awakened the savage in him. The smallest movement or casual touch made him want to rip off her clothes and press her back on the table and rut on her wildly. His mother would not have approved. — Annabel Joseph

Don't you ever touch my car again," Santangelo says with the same fury he had on his face when Jonah Griggs made
comments about his mother.
Raffy touches the car with her finger in a very dramatic way.
"You've just made our hit list," he says, getting a hanky out of his pocket and cleaning off some imaginary mark. — Melina Marchetta

Her voice was so melancholy that Gansey was struck all at once by what he and Blue really lost by keeping their relationship a secret. Blue radiated psychic energy for others, but touch was where she gained hers back. She was always hugging her mother or holding Noah's hand or linking her elbow in Adam's or resting her boots on Ronan's legs as they sat on the sofa. Touching Gansey's neck just between his hair and his collar. This worry in her tone demanded fingers braided together, arms on shoulders, cheeks rested against chests.
But because Gansey was too cowardly to tell Adam about falling in love with her, she had to stand there with her sadness by herself.
Aurora took Blue's hand. — Maggie Stiefvater

Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian? — Susan Abulhawa

If you loved the world the Creator had made for you, you did not shut out the blue heaven and its lights, or lie in foul air in a stuffy room, when in a bed outside you could smell the morning and watch its mother-of-pearl light softly touch the hills. — Vardis Fisher

Dead Butterflies
I sometimes think about the fragility of glass - of broken shards tearing against soft skin.When in truth, it is the transparency that kills you. The pain of seeing through to something you can never quite touch. For years I've kept you in secret, behind a glass screen. I've watched helplessly as day after day, your new girlfriend becomes your wife and then later, the mother of your children. Then realizing their only in thinking you were the one under glass when in fact it has been me - a pinned butterfly static and unmoving, watching while your other life unfolds. — Lang Leav

A babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart. — William Wordsworth

A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frigthtened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid.
Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.
"It looks beautiful", her mother had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. "It is beautiful. But it makes people sick."
To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilles, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don't touch, don't taste, don't get too close.
And then, last week. — Megan Abbott

Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn's soul begs for the artist's touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

People in India like to touch a lot. It's not very nice for any girl to be touched by strangers wherever they want. You wouldn't do that to your sister or mother, but just because one is an actor, they think she is your property. — Preity Zinta

In my 'Big Dinners' cookbook, I recreated my mother's recipe for crab dip. The creamy dressing for this dip, made with mayonnaise, tomato paste, a touch of honey, sliced chives, lemon juice and zest, horseradish and Tabasco, is reminiscent of Thousand Island dressing. — Tom Douglas

I've never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother's eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me. No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their remnants to live long past the grave? ... All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our own ghosts; we haunt ourselves. — Diana Gabaldon

Why keep in touch with them? That's what I want to know,' asked Larry despairingly. 'What satisfaction does it give you? They're all either fossilized or mental.'
'Indeed, they're not mental,' said Mother indignantly.
'Nonsense, Mother ... Look at Aunt Bertha, keeping flocks of imaginary cats ... and there's Great-Uncle Patrick, who wanders about nude and tells complete strangers how he killed whales with a penknife ... They're all bats. — Gerald Durrell

Lynn pulled her own rifle into her lap, the cold metal bringing more comfort to her than Mother's touch ever could. Her finger curled around the trigger, hugging it tight in the life-taking embrace that she'd learned so long ago. She slipped onto her belly beside Mother, watching the sunlight bounce off the twin barrels of their rifles. Waiting was always the worst part, the crack of the rifle a relief. — Mindy McGinnis

Pick up a thing," [Wizard Kadmeion's]mother would say. "Touch, smell, and taste it. Listen to its nonsense. Then put the funny thing in its proper place. — Lita Burke

If Christianity is true, this changes EVERYTHING. Christ's very last words to us in scripture were: "Behold, I make all things new." (Rev. 21:5) I hope you remember that most moving line in the most moving movie ever made, The Passion Of The Christ, when Christ turns to His mother on the way to Calvary, explaining the need for the Cross and the blood and the agony: "See, Mother, I make all things new." I hope you remember that line with your tear ducts, which connect to the heart, as well as with your ears, which connect to the brain. Christ changed every human being he ever met. In fact, He changed history, splitting it open like a coconut and inserting eternity into the split between B.C. and A.D. If anyone claims to have met Him without being changed, he has not met Him at all. When you touch Him, you touch lightning. — Peter Kreeft

Humility is the mother of all virtues; purity, charity and obedience. It is in being humble that our love becomes real, devoted and ardent. If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. If you are blamed you will not be discouraged. If they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal. — Mother Teresa

I know a flower that grows in the valley, none knows it but I. It has purple leaves, and a star in its heart, and its juice is as white as milk. Should'st thou touch with this flower the hard lips of the Queen, she would follow thee all over the world. Out of the bed of the King she would rise, and over the whole world she would follow thee. And it has a price, pretty boy, it has a price. What d'ye lack? What d'ye lack? I can pound a toad in a mortar, and make broth of it, and stir the broth with a dead man's hand. Sprinkle it on thine enemy while he sleeps, and he will turn into a black viper, and his own mother will slay him. With a wheel I can draw the Moon from heaven, and in a crystal I can show thee Death. What d'ye lack? What d'ye lack? Tell me thy desire, and I will give it thee, and thou shalt pay me a price, pretty boy, thou shalt pay me a price. — Oscar Wilde

She put her hand on his shoulder and gave a soft squeeze. She did not know what else to do. First her mother, then her father and Fanen, and finally Hilfred - they were all gone. Mauvin was slipping away as well. The boy who loved his sword more than Wintertide presents, sweet chocolate cake, or swimming on a hot day refused to touch it anymore. The eldest son of Count Pickering, who had once challenged the sun to a duel because it had rained on the day of a hunt, spent his days watching ducks. — Michael J. Sullivan

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother's head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through. — Carol Rifka Brunt

If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy. — Thich Nhat Hanh

We believe that everything in the world is a carrier of shakti or energy. The plants, animals, objects, our bodies, everything carries and transmits energy. But the biggest carrier of energy that we are physically in touch with is Mother Earth herself - the ground that we walk on. — Amish Tripathi

Saint Helena," Dennis said, "also known as the empress Helena was the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine the great. Birthdate not known but thought to be either 246 or 250AD. Died 330AD. Famous for finding the relics from Christ's crucifixion. She found the nails and rope used to fix him to his cross. She also found the cross on which he was crucified. She found a total of three crosses and had a woman from Jerusalem, who was near death, touch each one. When the woman touched the third cross she was cured. — Julian Noyce

The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees. — Jeanette Winterson

Outside the gates the spectacle seemed tame in comparison; for the road bent toward Pontesordo, and Odo was familiar enough with the look of the bare fields, set here and there with oak-copses to which the leaves still clung. As the carriage skirted the marsh his mother raised the windows, exclaiming that they must not expose themselves to the pestilent air; and though Odo was not yet addicted to general reflections, he could not but wonder that she should display such dread of an atmosphere she had let him breathe since his birth. He knew of course that the sunset vapours on the marsh were unhealthy: everybody on the farm had a touch of the ague, and it was a saying in the village that no one lived at Pontesordo who could buy an ass to carry him away; but that Donna Laura, in skirting the place on a clear morning of frost, should show such fear of infection, gave a sinister emphasis to the ill-repute of the region. — Edith Wharton

Old people are starved of touch: no husband, no lover, no child to slip a hand into a hand, to plant sticky kisses on nose and cheek and mouth, to snuggle and fit into the curves of the body. I watched my grandmother - my mother's mother - in her last years: her hand, the skin drawn parchmentlike over the bones, stroking, stroking, the chairs, the table, the bedspread. — Ahdaf Soueif

[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue. — Dave Eggers

Hobie's reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn't felt a touch like that since my mother died - friendly, steadying in the midst of confusing events - and, like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nobody will hurt me here. — Donna Tartt

How long?" Jayce's scalding breath singed the side of Wes' neck as he spoke against his skin. "Does Scotto know about you and me? Does he know I'm the one who ruined you for him and all men?"
Bastard was so full of himself. Wes remained quiet and ceased his struggles. He could breathe since Jayce's hold wasn't too tight. But his chest heaved and his groin throbbed like a mother. He hated how he responded to the slightest touch from Jayce. — Avril Ashton

Love had still seemed like such a paltry thing in the face of all my doubts then, much the way it felt now. David had worries my love couldn't touch, fears my love couldn't easily dispel. My love seemed like a well-worn blanket instead of the titanium shield I needed. — Andrea Lochen

This empty act could no more be mistaken for a mother's touch than the wind that fills out some dress on a clothesline might be confused with an actual body. — Darin Strauss

There is a sensuality about fabric. I think all materials should be inviting when they touch the skin. When I watch children stroking their mother's clothes, I feel that I have succeeded. — Azzedine Alaia

Mothers are the heart and soul of every life they touch. In them lies the beauty, depth and grandeur of life. Cherish the Children is an inspirational expression of the importance of a Mother's work. — Jane Clayson Johnson

Trust grows when babies and mothers establish that they can find each other again after the inevitable moments of losing touch. It is not the goodness of the mother or the relationship per se that is the basis for trust; it is the ability of mother and baby together to repair the breaks in their relationship that builds a safe house for love. — Carol Gilligan

1. Are her lips like the hot chocolate your mother made
During the winter months when you were seven? Or have you not tasted her well enough to find the fine granules of cocoa that lightly come with each kiss?

2. Do you know her favorite songs? Not when she is happy, but when she is sad. What music reaches inside her ribcage and softly consoles her heart?

3. When she is sad, are you on the phone or are you at her door? Words do not wipe away tears, fingers do.

4. Do you know all the things that keep her up at night? Do you know why she has gone three days without sleep? Do you know of the insurmountable waves of sadness that wash over her like a tsunami?

5. Do you know the things to say that will calm her heartbeat? The places to touch? The places to love?

6. Everytime you see her do you kiss her like it's the last time but love her like it's the first?

7. Do you love her?

8. Do you love her? — Nishat Ahmed

As a child, he had hardened his heart and learned to take their punches. He had learned to spit back and take down anyone who cast a jaundiced eye or who made a comment about either him, his mother, or his sister.
He'd told himself that he didn't need anyone's love or caring. And so he had learned to live like a feral animal, always ready to strike out when someone tried to touch him. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus years jumped into an open lift shaft and died. Now this was a subject which Alicia Cone, who would readily discuss the most taboo matters refused to touch upon. Why does a survivor of the camps live forty years then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood working its way through until it reaches the heart? Or worse, can a man's death be incompatible with his life? Alicia, who's first response on hearing of her father's death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother, who stone-faced beneath a broad-brimmed black hat said only, You have inherited his lack of restraint my dear. — Salman Rushdie

And when we fall, God quickly lifts us up, leaping out into our lives like a mother playing peek-a-boo with her child, reassuring the baby with her touch. And when we have been strengthened by God's action in our lives, then we choose with all our consciousness to serve God and be God's lovers, endlessly. But — Julian Of Norwich

I had never seen hair that purely black. It was glossy and slightly long, the ends drifting over his collar. That sexy length was the crowning touch of bad boy hotness over the successful businessman, like whipped cream topping on a hot fudge brownie sundae. As my mother would say, only rogues and raiders had hair like that. (Eva about Gideon) — Sylvia Day

When we were in our mother's womb, we felt secure - protected from heat, cold, and hunger. But the moment we were born and came into contact with the world's suffering, we began to cry. Since then, we have yearned to return to the security of our mother's womb. We long for permanence, but everything is changing. We desire an absolute, but even what we call our "self" is impermanent. We seek a place where we can feel safe and secure, a place we can rely on for a long time. When we touch the ground, we feel the stability of the earth and feel confident. When we observe the steadiness of the sunshine, the air, and the trees, we know that we can count on the sun to rise each day and the air and the trees to be there tomorrow. When we build a house, we build it on ground that is solid. Before putting our trust in others, we need to choose friends who are stable, on whom we can rely. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I think that, very often there's a pain that's just too painful to touch. You'll break apart. And I think her mother's death and disappearance and abandonment was something she just never could deal with. Eleanor Roosevelt, when she's really very unwell in 1936, she takes to her bed. She has a mysterious flu. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

The last thing I remember ia an exquisitely beautiful green and silver moth landing on the curve of my wrist. The sound of rain on the roof of our house gently pulls me toward consciousness. I fight to return to sleep though, wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets, safe at home. I'm vaguely aware that my head aches. Possibly I have the flu and this is why I'm allowed to stay in bed, even though I can tell I've been asleep a long time. My mother's hand strokes my cheek and I don't push is away as I would in wakefulness, never wanting her to know how much I crave that gentle touch. How much I miss her even though I still don't trust her. Then there's a voice, the wrong voice, not my mother's and i'm scared. — Suzanne Collins

If mothers are told to do this or that or the other, ... they lose touch with their own ability to act ... Only too easily they feel incompetent. If they must look up everything in a book, they are always too late even when they do the right things, because the right things have to be done immediately. It is only possible to act at exactly the right point when the action is intuitive or by instinct, as we say. The mind can be brought to bear on the problem afterwards. — Donald Woods Winnicott

My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she'd learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother's hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free. — Patricia Engel

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God. — Mother Teresa

ached, until his head throbbed, all of that preparation comes down to today. It's finally here! He quickly brushes his teeth and puts on his Halloween costume. He picks up the trombone case and his school backpack and heads downstairs quietly, not wanting to wake his mother. He rips open the cellophane and drops two Pop-Tarts into the toaster and pours himself a glass of milk. He drinks the milk but doesn't touch the pastries. — James Patterson

He told her what Bryony looked like and the almost tinkling sound of her voice, and her habit of standing on the balls of her feet when she gets nervous because somehow that puts her in touch with the earth a little bit more. "You'll love her, Ma, you'll love her," he said, and promised to bring her by soon so they could meet. He was afraid, however, that the second his mother saw Bryony, her face would fall. He imagined her brown eyes clouding over — Mercedes M. Yardley

You can touch me. You care and I don't know why. You're kind to me and you don't have to be. My own mother didn't care enough to - t-to - " My voice catches and I press my lips together. Glue them shut. Force myself to be still.

I am a rock. A statue. A movement frozen in time. Ice feels nothing at all. — Tahereh Mafi

Shadow wanted to shake himself, the awkward boy that he once was, get him to hold her hand, talk to her, do something before she slipped away, as he knew that she would. But he could not touch himself, and he continued to read; and so his mother died while he sat in the chair next to her, reading a fat book. After that he had more or less stopped reading. You could not trust fiction. What good were books, if they couldn't protect you from something like that? — Neil Gaiman

My mother's a genius. She just kept feeding me art on whatever we had; paper plates, silver platter, didn't matter. You know, she just kept feeding it to me. So we went to see all kinds of theater. We would go to the art museum pretty much every Sunday, and I would watch her. She let me know that art was supposed to touch. — Jill Scott

... .but at the same time, they got a miracle. It wasn't the kind that comes on a Macy's Thanksgiving Day float. And it wasn't the one that they wanted, where God would reach down from the sky and touch their girl with a magic wand and restore her to perfect health. Maybe that will still happen-who knows? I wouldn't put anything past God, because he or she is one crafty mother. Still, they did get a miracle, one of those dusty little red-wagon miracles, and they understand this. — Anne Lamott

At least initially, the relationship took on a nineteenth-century epistolatory quality. The only way they could stay in touch was by letter. In 1991, while South Korea was becoming the world's largest exporter of mobile telephones, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. But even writing a letter was not a simple undertaking. Writing paper was scarce. People would write in the margins of newspapers. The paper in the state stores was made of corn husk and would crumble easily if you scratched too hard. Mi-ran had to beg her mother for the money to buy a few sheets of imported paper. Rough drafts were out of the question; paper was too precious. The distance from Pyongyang to Chongjin was only 250 miles, but letters took up to a month to be delivered. — Barbara Demick

There is no other alternative, Huzoor. It is the mandate of Mother Chandi that a married woman only can become a Bhairabi, and three days after marriage, a Bhairabi cannot touch her husband anymore. So it has become a practice to arrange for a poor man from a distant place to marry a girl, before she is installed as a Bhairabi, and the man leaves after three days with enough money as reward. No one would see him ever again." Jibananda laughed. "What are you talking — Amitava Bhattacharya

Your body is as ancient as the clay of the universe from which it is made; and your feet on the ground are a constant connection with the earth. Your feet bring your private clay in touch with the ancient, mother clay from which you first emerged. — John O'Donohue

I'll take care of my mother," he said grimly. "I love her, but she doesn't run my life."
"Yeah, that's what we all say. You. Me. Lucy." She stabbed the stick into the dirt. "These are powerful women. They're sane, they're smart, they rule their worlds, and they love us ferociously. A potent combination that makes it touch to pretend they're normal mothers. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Unlike my mother, who was unashamedly delighted when I decided to become an actor, I always feel that my father, had he lived longer, might have been a touch disapproving of some of my career - I think he might have tutted a bit at 'Men Behaving Badly.' — Martin Clunes

No, no, don't touch your mother just before the baby is born. Now it will be a girl child, because you are one. Run along now. Take your evil eye with you."

"Ghias, we must be careful not to teach the girls too much. How will they ever find husbands if they are too learned? The less they know, the less they will want of the outside world. — Indu Sundaresan

I have come to you, Jesus, to take your touch before I begin my day. Let your eyes rest upon my eyes for a while let me take to my work the assurance of your friendship. Fill my mind to last through the desert of noise. Let your blessed sunshine fill the peaks of my thoughts. And give me strength for those who need me. — Mother Teresa

My tone must have seemed hostile, even though I wasn't angry or offended; there was just a touch of sarcasm. He tried to respond but he did so in an awkward, muddled way, half in dialect, half in Italian. He said he was sure that his mother was wandering around Naples as usual. — Elena Ferrante

Rodwell wandered into No Man's Land and put a bullet through his ears. On Sunday, Robert sat on his bed in the old hotel at Bailleul and read what Rodwell had written.
To my daughter, Laurine;
Love your mother.
Make your prayers against despair.
I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies.
I am your father always. — Timothy Findley

As i thought about all that surgar running through her veins, i imagined it as a kind of liquid candy. But when i asked her if it tasted sweet, she laughed quietly and said no. It stung, she said. But she needed it. She had to have it. All i could imagine was that candied water burning inside my mother. Like an invisible fire that i could not see or taste or touch or stop. — Christine Walde

I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she'd gone. — Chris Adrian

I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about living, there are always small reminders that make the loss fresh again. — Libba Bray

All I know is that my life is filled with little pockets of silence. When I put a record on the turntable, for example, there's a little interval-between the time the needle touches down on the record and the time the music actually starts-during which my heart refuses to beat. All I know is that between the rings of the telephone, between the touch of a button and the sound of the radio coming on, between the dimming of the lights at the cinema and the start of the film, between the lightning and the thunder, between the shout and the echo, between the lifting of a baton and the opening bars of a symphony, between the dropping of a stone and the plunk that comes back from the bottom of a well, between the ringing of the doorbell and the barking of the dogs I sometimes catch myself, involuntarily, listening for the sound of my mother's voice, still waiting for the tape to begin. — Robert Hellenga

My mother taught me how to apply my own makeup at 13 years old, and the most important lesson I learned is to never touch my eyebrows and to cleanse, tone, and moisturize twice a day. — Emilia Clarke

The little child who was to have done so much was born before the turf was planted on its father's grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father's name. The help that my dear counted on did come to her, though it came, in the eternal wisdom, for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand and how its touch could heal my darling's heart and raised hope within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of God. — Charles Dickens

His personal fulfillment did not lead him to evolve a cheerful Madonna; on the contrary this Madonna was sad; she had already, through his sculptures, known the Descent. The tranquility of his early bas-relief, when Mary still had her decision to make, could never be recaptured. This young mother was committed; she knew the end of her boy's life. That was why she was reluctant to let him go, this beautiful, husky,healthy boy, his hand clasped for protection in hers. That
was why she sheltered him with the side of her cloak.
The child, sensitive to his mother's mood, had a touch of melancholy about the eyes. He was strong, he had courage, he would step forth from the safe harbor of his mother's lap, but just now he gripped her hand with the fingers of one hand, and with the
other held securely to her side. Or was it his own mother he was thinking about, sad because she must leave her son alone in the world? Himself, who clung to her? — Irving Stone

Silence gives us a new outlook on everything. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say but what God says to us and through us. — Mother Teresa

Darling Daddy,
Poor Saffy. She had a big fight in the boys toilets on Monday, did you know? A very big fight and Sarah helped and it was terrifying. Said a boy in my class who has a brother who was there.
Saffy washed her hands and said Never Ever Never Dare You Touch My Brother. (Indigo). And the plug holes were blocked with hair.
Love from Rose.
-Sarah's mother has given us soup. Soup soup soup and then it was all gone.
L.F.R. — Hilary McKay

It is not enough for us to say: "I love God," but I also have to love my neighbor. St. John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don't love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? — Mother Teresa

The degree to which the child-rearing professionals continue to be out of touch with reality is astounding. For example, a widely read manual on breast-feeding, devotes fewer than two pages to the working mother. — Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin-that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns. — Margaret Mitchell

I tried some more. It was tasting better. I was feeling better. "This stuff belongs to your father, Baldy. I shouldn't drink it all." "He doesn't care. He's stopped drinking." Never had I felt so good. It was better than masturbating. I went from barrel to barrel. It was magic. Why hadn't someone told me? With this, life was great, a man was perfect, nothing could touch him. I stood up straight and looked at Baldy. "Where's your mother? I'm going to fuck your mother! — Charles Bukowski

DEAR MISS MANNERS:
I a tired of being treated like a child. My father says it's because I am a child
I am twelve-and-a-half years old
but it still isn't fair. If I go into a store to buy something, nobody pays any attention to me, or if they do, it's to say, "Leave that alone," "Don't touch that," although I haven't done anything. My money is as good as anybody's, but because I am younger, they feel they can be mean to me. It happens to me at home, too. My mother's friend who comes over after dinner sometimes, who doesn't have any children of her own and doesn't know what's what, likes to say to me, "Shouldn't you be in bed by now,dear?" when she doesn't even know what my bedtime is supposed to be. Is there any way I can make these people stop?
GENTLE READER:
Growing up is the best revenge. — Judith Martin

A mother's body against a child's body makes a place. It says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother. Or miss a place or know something called home. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life ... The absence of a body against my body made attachment abstract. Made my own body dislocated and unable to rest or settle. A body pressed against your body is the beginning of nest. I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence that led to a life of constant movement, of leaving and falling. It is why at one point I couldn't stop drinking and fucking. Why I needed people to touch me all the time. It had less to do with sex than location. When you press against me, or put yourself inside me. When you hold me down or lift me up, when you lie on top of me and I can feel your weight, I exist. I am here. — Eve Ensler

That's all right! That's all right!' But for a minute or two it wasn't really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities - even merely with the velvet. He added: 'Your mother works you very hard. — Ford Madox Ford

With the gentle force of their words, the dogged warmth of their embrace, and the assuring touch of souls softly bared, mothers are silently shaping whole societies and authoring entire cultures that sit poised on the horizon of the future. And although we ignorantly relegate such roles to some lower caste status, we would be wise to understand that the role of a mother sets the cadence of the future. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Circenn moved swiftly, intending to catch the tear upon his finger, kiss it away, then kiss away all her pain and fear, and assure her that he would permit no harm to touch her and would spend his life making things up to her; but she dropped the flask onto the table and turned swiftly.
"Please, leave me alone," she said and turned away from him. "Let me comfort you, Lisa," he entreated.
"Leave me alone."
For the first time in his life, Circenn
felt utterly helpless. Let her grieve, his heart instructed. She would need to grieve, for discovering that the flask didn't work was tantamount to lowering her mother into a solitary grave. She would grieve her mother as if she'd in truth died that very day. May God
forgive me, he prayed. I did not know what I was doing when I cursed that flask. — Karen Marie Moning

Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years. — Mickey Rourke

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken. — Theodore Dreiser

Did my mother hum to me when I was little? Did she touch me, hold me, fill me with her noise and her thoughts? This loneliness I feel is of the womb, born by women. I was sixteen when they all died and I thought I understood this loss, but it comes to me that I didn't know what women gave to the world. It wasn't about their lips, their eyes or the gentle quality of their voices. It was about the way that all men are a part of them. And now we are part of nothing. — Aliya Whiteley

Adam's mother ran the farm, bore Adam, and still had time to embrace a primitive theosophy. She felt that her husband would surely be killed by the wild and barbarous rebels, and she prepared herself to get in touch with him in what she called the beyond. — John Steinbeck

Gods are boring creatures, Bet. Most are nosthing more than spoiled children with powers they never hesitate to use against those weaker. And while your father can be juvenile at times, there is a danger to him. He understands his power ans he's fierce with it. More than that, he doesn't prey on those weaker, he only attacks those who are stronger/ That was what dreq me to him and why i agreed tp be the mother of his daugher. His strength, and the fact that he never once did he use it against me. Your father is like having a lion for a pet. You know that it's a creature of utter and supreme violence whose mere nature and talent is murder, and yet it lies down at your side and purrs for your touch alone. There is nothing more titillating.
But more than that was hpw you father made me feel. He awoke something inside me that had never lived before. He breathed life into my soul and I was a better person for having known him — Sherrilyn Kenyon

All the while Martin attempted to catch his aunt with a remorseful gaze, but the young woman was reabsorbed into her mother's orbit, and though Anna embraced him, pressed on him the importance of visiting soon, he could feel that she was already very far away, not really seeing him, but cruising with distant eyes and a feather's touch over the summits of all her disappointments. — Carola Perla

Son, I hope your opinion of your mother hasn't lessened, knowing what you now know."
Gavin glanced up; incredulity skewed his eyebrows. His expression appeared both stunned and appalled. "Never, Father! I love her! It makes no difference to me where she came from."
The man nodded, a show of relief in his features. His large hand, soft in touch, went to brush a string of hair away from his wife's peaceful profile. "Your mother loves you too, son, more than anything in the world. She worries about you, day and night."
That sentiment stirred something profoundly pleasant inside the boy. He grinned at the internal warmth it created. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Children are touched by heaven - their every breath, every laugh, every touch a sip of water to the desert wanderer. I could not have known this as a child, but I know it as a mother, a truth I learned as my own heart grew, bent, danced, and broke for each of my children — Nadia Hashimi

How to look after your very drunk friend
Step 1: Find her in the bathroom, slumped against the towel rack

Step 2: Ask her if she needs to be sick. Try not to get offended when she yells that she's NOT DRUNK

Step 3: Tell her it's fine when she apologises, bursts into tears and then falls asleep on your shoulder.

[...]

Step 6: Root around in her front pocket for her keys. Make a joke about inappropriate touching. Laugh when she earnestly tells you that you could touch her anywhere, because nothing's inappropriate when you're best friends.

Step 7: Write it down so you can mock her with it tomorrow, and for the rest of time.

Step 8: Tell her mother that yes, you both had a great time. Pour two glasses of water, carry them both up the stairs (Make her go first, so you can catch her if she trips) — Sara Barnard

Move on, sky is not limit, wind can touch you, water can dip you, mother will care you, wife will nurture you and above all, oneday you will see your child following, up above the sky; you became a star, twinkling, watching and waiting to come back again, on earth. — Santosh Kalwar

Listening to learn isn't about giving advice
at least not until asked
but about trying to understand exactly what someone means,how it is that someone looks at and feels about her particular situation ... Listening to learn from a daughter in adolescence, conspiring with her thoughts and feelings, keeps a mother in touch with a daughter's growing and changing self. — Elizabeth Debold

Rachel had a feeling there might have been a story about the procurement of the macarons, but she didn't really listen when Lauren was speaking about anything that didn't involve Jacob. She selected a red one and took a tentative bite. "Oh, God," she moaned a moment later, and thought, for the first time in she didn't know how long, of sex. She took a bigger bite. "Mother Mary." She laughed out loud. No wonder people lined up for them. It was exquisite; the raspberry flavor of the creamy center was like the barest touch of fingertips on her skin, the meringue light and tender, like eating a cloud. — Liane Moriarty

For three nights he hadn't known how to touch my mother or what to say. Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow the stronger one's strength. And they had never understood, as they did now, what the word horror meant.

~pgs 20-21 — Alice Sebold

It's a whole nother aspect of this life that most people have no idea about. There's the loved ones, the wives, the girlfriends, the children. Some of the people out here are fathers and mothers. Whether you mean to or not, you end up neglecting your family in a lot of ways. Even if you do your best to keep in touch, the fact of the matter is that you're physically absent. — Chuck Ragan

My mother taught me to be honest, to be selfless, and to touch people in a positive way. — Scott Eastwood

There had been a time when she had regarded Gamila with a touch of disdain. She had considered herself stronger than Gamila, than her aunt, than her father - and stronger than their beliefs, their rules , their traditions. She had laughed with a certain superiority when her mother had said, 'The one who knows the fundamentals does not suffer.' Yes, she had existed for a time in the shadow of this silly illusion. But in truth it was she who was silly, trivial, conceited, and despicable. She was the doormat beneath people's soles. — Latifa Al-Zayyat

Really, her [Mother Mary] spirit is everywhere, Lily, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people, but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at you in a special way ... I started thinking about the world loaded with disguised Marys sitting around all over the place and hidden red hearts tucked about that people could rub and touch, only we didn't recognize them. — Sue Monk Kidd

I had a very Italian house - the "plastic furniture you couldn't sit on" house. Did anybody have the museum house? For a kid it's traumatic. Towels you can never touch. China no one's ever gonna use. Everything is for a special occasion that never happens. My mother was waiting for the Pope to show up for dinner. Or Sinatra. Or Chachi. — Ray Romano

Sarabeth wondered at the sheer energy it must have taken for her mother to be dissatisfied by so much. Her psyche was like a huge grid of mousetraps, set to spring at the lightest touch. There were traps for Sarabeth's father,traps for Sarabeth. The biggest trap, though, was the grid itself,the trap of being Lorelei. — Ann Packer

My mother plants her hands on her hips, peevish. "Is that the best welcome you can come up with? Why don't you come over here and give your father a hug?" Hug him? Touch him? How can she even suggest it? — Laura Wiess

It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose ambition is to be present, in full possession of her senses, when the infant she already adores greets her with its first loud cry and the soft touch of its restless body upon her limbs. — Grantly Dick-Read

She had long been a cold and calculating person, and yet she had never given in to the darkness entirely. She would remember her mother's touch or the voice of a lost friend, and the tiniest bit of hope would return. — Patrick Carman