All Night Mother Quotes & Sayings

One thing that keeps me awake at night: I am a mother and, I have to confess with great delight, a grandmother of five girls, which gives me great hope for the future - girl power! Can I say that without alienating all of the men? — Queen Noor Of Jordan

I think tonight's the night I will hang Howard W. Campbell Jr., for crimes against himself... They say that a hanging man hears gorgeous music. Too bad that I, like my father, unlike my musical mother, am tone-deaf. All the same I hope the tune that I'm about to hear is not Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

There are 64 divine mother impulses which govern the subtle creation. These are responsible for restoring all earthly and spiritual benefits. They are simply part of one's awakened consciousness. These nine nights are celebrated to rekindle those divine impulses and celebrate the innermost depth of our lives — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

I could go on all night, Lake. I could go on and on and on about all the reasons I'm in love with you. And you know what? Some of them are the things that life has thrown our way. I do love you because you're the only other person I know who understands my situation. I do love you because both of us know what it's like to lose your mom and your dad. I do love you because you're raising your little brother, just like I am. I love you because of what you went through with your mother.
I love you because of what we went through with your mother. I love the way you love Kel. I love the way you love Caulder. And I love the way I love Kel. So I'm not about to apologize for loving all these things about you, no matter the reasons or the circumstances behind them. And no, I don't need days, or weeks, or months to think about why I love you. It's an easy answer for me. I love you because of you. Because of every single thing about you. — Colleen Hoover

Lady of the silver moon
Enchantress of the night
Protect me and mine within this circle fairly cast.
Earth Mother, mother of the sleeping earth,
Keep safe all who gather here
Within the protective shelter of your arms.
By the earth that is Her body,
By the air that is Her breath,
By the fire that is Her bright spirit,
And by the living waters of Her womb,
Our circle is cast,
None shall come to harm here,
From any forces,
On any level.
As we will,
So shall it be done.
As we will,
So mote it be. — Madelyn Alt

Everybody knows that a good mother gives her children a feeling of trust and stability. She is their earth. She is the one they can count on for the things that matter most of all. She is their food and their bed and the extra blanket when it grows cold in the night; she is their warmth and their health and their shelter; she is the one they want to be near when they cry. She is the only person in the whole world in a whole lifetime who can be these things to her children. There is no substitute for her. — Katharine Butler Hathaway

Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.'
'Good night,' I said, and rolled onto my side.
'There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life. — Sue Monk Kidd

That night, when SanJuanna had cleared the main course and brought dessert in, my mother called for quiet and said,
"Boys, I have an announcement to make. Your sister made the apple pies tonight. I'm sure we will all enjoy them very much."
"Can I learn how, ma'am?" said Jim Bowie.
"No, J.B. Boys don't bake pies," Mother said.
"Why not?" he said.
"They have wives who make pies for them."
"But I don't have a wife."
"Darling, I'm sure you will have a very nice one someday when you're older, and she'll make you many pies. Calpurnia, would you care to serve?"
Was there any way I could have a wife, too? I wondered as I cut through the browned C and promptly shattered the entire crust. — Jacqueline Kelly

My father was a Catholic, a coal miner in the Big Pit. My mother a Jew. A charwoman, when she could find the work. They didn't fit in Wales. Nor in the U.K., either. They didn't fit with each other all that well, for that matter. They fought every day for as long as I can remember and loved each other more than anyone I've ever known. At least they did right up till a night when he looked right and not left at a train crossing in Chepstow and ended up half a mile from where he'd started, dead as the Ghost. Looking for a job, he was. Turned out he didn't need one. — Patrick Reinken

Like threads of old spider webs, still sticky and hovering, the past waits for us to submit, or depart. When I least expect it, a memory comes skittering out of the dark, spinning and netting the air, ready to snap me up and ensnare me in old and complex puzzles. Just a glimpse of a worn-out patchwork quilt and the old question comes thudding out of the night again like a great moth. Why did my mother not return? After all these years, I find myself wondering, but with the dullness of expecting no response. — Joy Kogawa

Elinor retreated to the terrace where the night air on her skin felt like a hot bath. She was hurt, it had been such an onslaught. All the things she'd achieved in the past four years, the independent life she'd built for herself, seemed to count for nothing here. The only thing that mattered to her mother was finding a husband. As for painting, well, nice little hobby, very suitable, but you won't have much time for that when the children arrive. — Pat Barker

She could smell her mother's skin, her lotion, her perfume
her essence. She missed her so much. She clawed at her pillow, wanting to cry, but tears never came, just a swirling riptide of feeling
anger, abandonment, the fear of being alone, and the weight of the emotional millstone still tied around her neck, submerging her further into the murky depths of stinging, biting solitude. She wished she could wail all night. Instead she curled up in the darkness of her bedroom, listening to her racing heartbeat, which eventually slowed, like the ticking of a clock unwound. — Jamie Ford

We may live in concrete nests piled on top of each other, we may file in and out of our planes and freeways in neat lines, but we are making it all up as we go along. An ant is born into a complex chemical environment where every small instruction had been laid down in advance. Mother tells the workers what to do and they do everything for the greater good of their enormous family.
In contrast, every human being is capable of working for the advancement of their own procreating, their own minuscule families. Yet we somehow recognize the value of a larger form of society, and readily respond to a larger world beyond our own narrow self-interests. With our unique creative capacity, we have modified ourselves as we have modified our physical conditions, and we have developed an extraordinary division of labor. You and I may be as different as night and day, but that is our strength, and it is precisely this diversification that makes my time in Africa so intensely satisfying. — Craig Packer

For storms will rage and oceans roar,
When Gabriel stands on sea and shore,
And as he blows his wondrous horn,
Old worlds die and new be born. — Deborah Harkness

This morning when I looked out the roof window
before dawn and a few stars were still caught
in the fragile weft of ebony night
I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my mother's belly.
It works, of course, and deer came into this room
and wondered at finding themselves
in a house near downtown Denver.
Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
to get them back, to get all of us back,
because if it works I'm going with them.
And it's too early to call Louis
and nearly too late to go home.
[from poem, "Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On"] — Joy Harjo

I suddenly saw her quite differently. I saw that she was a person. Not my mother. She had thought it all out. She had wanted to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide. On that night I grew up. Or so I would like to believe. — Doris Lessing

When I was little, my brother drew an image for me on the train ride home from the academy. It was a map of Internment, only instead of the real city, he'd drawn a castle for the clock tower. And the buildings were all different somehow. Mysterious. And right at the edge he drew a ladder that went down and disappeared into the clouds. It was the most spectacular thing I'd ever seen, and getting ready for my bath that night, I discovered it had fallen from a hole on my skirt pocket. I wanted to go out and look for it, but my mother told me the sweepers had already come. The paper would be collected with all the other forgotten-about things and it would be compressed and recycled into something new.
I looked for it the next day, anyway, to no avail. I couldn't believe such a wonderful thing could be destroyed so simply. I learned that it could. Anything could be destroyed. — Lauren DeStefano

Then one of the most hurtful memories came up. It was one night about a year ago. I was 16 and my mom brought a man home. She was high and passed out in her bed. The man staggered into my room and grabbed me. He tied my mouth shut and he rapped me. Right in the same bed with my mother high and passed out. All I could do was cry and I couldn't even yell loud enough to wake her up. — Anthony London

Oh, when a mother meets on high The babe she lost in infancy, Hath she not then for pains and fears, The day of woe, the watchful night, For all her sorrow, all her tears, An over-payment of delight? — Robert Southey

Her final night in the quarters was sleepless, even though she needed her strength. The other Hob women dozed beside her in the loft. She listened to their breathing: That is Nag; that is Rida with her one ragged exhalation every other minute. This time tomorrow she would be loose in the night. Is this what her mother felt when she decided? Cora's image of her was remote. What she remembered now was her sadness. Her mother was a Hob woman before there was a Hob. With the same reluctance to mix, the burden that bent her at all times and set her apart. Cora couldn't put her together in her mind. Who was she? Where was she now? Why had she left her? Without a special kiss to say, When you remember this moment later you will understand that I was saying goodbye even if you did not know it. — Colson Whitehead

Roebling rejoined the Army of the Potomac in February 1863 back at Fredericksburg, where he was quartered late one night in an old stone jail, from which he would emerge the following morning with a story that would be told in the family for years and years to come. The place had little or no light, it seems, and Roebling, all alone, groping his way about, discovered an old chest that aroused his curiosity. He lifted the lid and reaching inside, his hand touched a stone-cold face. The lid came back down with a bang. Deciding to investigate no further, he cleared a place on the floor, stretched out, and went to sleep. At daybreak he opened the chest to see what sort of corpse had been keeping him company through the night and found instead a stone statue of George Washington's mother that had been stored away for safekeeping. — David McCullough

VIDEO ARCHIVE- INTERVIEW 24768 . GOLD-EYE I like trees ... grass ... only birds in sky. People walking safe. Family No Creatures. Sleep all night safe. Walk under sun in own place. Grow plants. Build. Be father with mother. Have Children. A place like Petar told me. Home. After Change goes back ... I want home. — Garth Nix

Hannah is missing school because one night, her father exiled her and her mother and Allison from the house. This was, obviously, somewhat insane. But it wasn't more insane or cruel than other things he's done, which is not to say he's insane or cruel all the time. He's himself; he can be perfectly pleasant; he's the weather system they live with , and all the behavior, whenever he is around, hinges on his mood. Don't the three of them understand that living with him simply is what it is? To complain or resist would be as useless as complaining about or resisting a tornado. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Recuerdo
We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

She is the person I ran to when I got my period; the one who helped me knit back together my first broken heart; the hand I would reach for in the middle of the night when I could no longer remember which side our father parted his hair on, or what it sounded like when our mother laughed. No matter what she is now, before all that, she was my built-in best friend. — Jodi Picoult

I'm serious, Harry, don't go. But Harry only had one thought in his head, which was to get back in front of the mirror, and Ron wasn't going to stop him.
That third night he found his way more quickly than before. He was walking so fast he knew he was making more noise than was wise, but he didn't meet anyone.
And there were his mother and father smiling at him again, and one of his grandfathers nodding happily. Harry sank down to sit on the floor in front of the mirror. There was nothing to stop him from staying here all night with his family. Nothing at all. — J.K. Rowling

I'm not going!" she screamed, grabbing her mother by the shoulder. But Laura didn't even turn around. She hiccupped, once, and watery vomit splashed onto the floor between her legs. Maggie let go of her mother's shoulder then, her rage replaced not exactly with pity, but with such a tired disgust with her whole pathetic family that she gave up. Kevin never came home at all that night, and the next afternoon, Nanny Ei drove them to O'Hare. — Jessie Ann Foley

If she were their mother she'd teach them these things are nothing, the clothes and toys and furniture. These things fool people into thinking they must stay where the things are. Leave it all, she'd teach them, even your hopes, and all the dreams of safe, calm places. Go with what is most terrifying, the dizzying empty night and the lonely stars until night slows and you see the whole design. Always choose love over safety if you can tell the difference ... — Josephine Humphreys

I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it. — Kathryn Stockett

All he felt was that same feeling he'd always had, that he was looking for something, whose name he didn't even know, and yet now, in the dark of the night and with his father had gone to wherever his mother had gone before, with Anna sitting beside him, he suddenly knew its name. Home. — Marcus Sedgwick

She belonged to the day, to warmth and sunshine. Her world was light and wonderful, filled with love and laughter.
And he was born of night. His mother was the darkness, her cold embrace was all he had a right to crave. Just as the sun destroyed the night, he was sure she would destroy him, provided their enemies didn't kill her first.
He refused to watch her die.
-Nykyrian's thoughts — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The Sleeping

I have imagined all this:
In 1940 my parents were in love
And living in the loft on West 10th
Above Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses
On their bedroom walls the night they got married.

I can guess why he did it.
My mother's hair was the color of yellow apples
And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.

I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight.
It is hard for me to imagine that
My parents made love in a roomful of roses
And I wasn't there.

But now I am. My mother is blushing.
This is the wonderful thing about art.
It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleeping
As it might have late that night
When my father and mother made love above Rothko
Who lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses. — Lynn Emanuel

That was the big joke, wasn't it? The answer to the riddle: There was no one up there in Heaven, making sure the accounts came out right. I'd solved it, hadn't I? Cracked the code? It was all just a joke. The god inside my brother's head was just his disease. My mother had knelt every night and prayed to her own steepled hands. Your baby died because of ... because of no particular reason at all. Your wife left you because you sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so you pretended she was the one in bed with you while you screwed your girlfriend and her boyfriend hid in the closet, watching. — Wally Lamb

On Christmas Eve, my mother and I and Teddy and Anita went to Mass together. The shadowy church was lit only by an overhead light trained on the altar and by the flames of hundreds of flickering candles in glass cups set all around the nave. If you squinted, the columns and vaults seemed to melt away, all the grandness of the architecture receded, and the space became intimate, almost as if you were cast back many centuries to a humble place where a miracle had occurred, where the radiance issued not from candles but from the air itself, back to a less hectic era before the invention of clocks, to a night of peace from which a renewed world would then begin to date itself. — Dean Koontz

She didn't remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she'd gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn't remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a glass of something with ice cubes that clinked and caught the light. She remembered the drink but not her mother's face. She'd pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family. — Emily St. John Mandel

When you don't have something anymore, you learn to live without it." That's what my dad told me that first night after he found me sleeping inside a closet underneath a pile of my mom's clothes. All the different smells of her were still there and the memories were alive even if she wasn't.
I looked up into his face and wondered why would I ever want to learn to live without her? That felt like she really would be gone forever, and I wanted to limp on the broken piece of me so I could feel her there all the time. — Alan Silberberg

To Selene (Moon)

Hear, Goddess queen, diffusing silver light, bull-horn'd and wand'ring thro' the gloom of Night.
With stars surrounded, and with circuit wide Night's torch extending, thro' the heav'ns you ride:
Female and Male with borrow'd rays you shine, and now full-orb'd, now tending to decline.
Mother of ages, fruit-producing Moon [Mene], whose amber orb makes Night's reflected noon:
Lover of horses, splendid, queen of Night, all-seeing pow'r bedeck'd with starry light.
Lover of vigilance, the foe of strife, in peace rejoicing, and a prudent life:
Fair lamp of Night, its ornament and friend, who giv'st to Nature's works their destin'd end.
Queen of the stars, all-wife Diana hail! Deck'd with a graceful robe and shining veil;
Come, blessed Goddess, prudent, starry, bright, come moony-lamp with chaste and splendid light,
Shine on these sacred rites with prosp'rous rays, and pleas'd accept thy suppliant's mystic praise. — Orpheus

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year. — Pat Conroy

But for a mother who was submissive to the degree my mother was, it was OK to kill girls. For a father like mine, it was normal to chop off his daughters hair with sheep shears, and to beat her with a belt or a cane or tie her up in the stable all night with the cows. — Souad

He was the son of this bitchy book reviewer. Totally blasted my first book. Called all my lovely kinksters 'sick' and 'abusive.' So I got my payback by sickly abusing her youngest all night long."
"And you felt guilty about that?"
"Not the sex. The note I sent Mom the next day."
"You sent his mother a note after you seduced her son? What did it say?"
"It said..." Nora began, and paused for a breath. Not one of her prouder moments. "It said, 'Your son gave me five stars last night. And five fingers.'"
"You're smiling."
"I'm trying so hard to feel bad about it. I swear to God I am. — Tiffany Reisz

My mother's side is Italian; my father's side is Jewish. We're the kind of family where every Sunday night we have dinner with all 19 of my cousins. — Lea Michele

Human beings don't work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we're too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to find them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can't sleep in this country because it doesn't shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants - always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done all at once here. Time was different in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards at each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the floor's not swept, the ironing's not ready, the money's not made. I would be still young if we lived in China. (1983: 98) — Maxine Hong Kingston

Tis a far cry from home for a poor lonely thing,
O'er the deeps and wild waters of seas,
Where you can't hear your dear mother's voice softly sing
Like a breeze gently stirring the trees.
Come home, little one, wander back here someday,
I'll watch for you, each evening and morn,
Through all the long season 'til I'm old and grey
As the frost on the hedges at dawn.
There's a lantern that shines in my window at night,
I have long kept it burning for you,
It glows through the dark, like a clear guiding light,
And I know someday you'll see it, too.
So hasten back, little one, or I will soon be gone,
No more to see your dear face,
But I know that I'll feel your tears fall one by one,
On the flowers o'er my resting place. — Brian Jacques

Does this mean we will always understand our challenges? Won't all of us, sometime, have reason to ask, 'O God, where art thou?' Yes! When a spouse dies, a companion will wonder. When financial hardship befalls a family, a father will ask. When children wander from the path, a mother and father will cry out in sorrow. Yes, 'weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.' Then, in the dawn of our increased faith and understanding, we arise and choose to wait upon the Lord, saying, 'Thy will be done.' — Robert D. Hales

One Saturday morning walking to the farmers' market with my lover she tells me she needs to look like a man on the street. She hates binding her breasts. Hates having breasts, hates not passing. I press her. I ask her, but what do you feel like when you're naked in bed with me? Do you like your body then? She is quiet. Later she tells me she had a dream. Her mother brought home a bottle of medicine from the hospital for her. The doctor says she has to take it. The medicine is testosterone.

On Shabbat I remember to pray for enough space inside of me to hold all the darkness of the night and all the sunlight of the day. I pray for enough space for transformations as miraculous as the shift from day to night.

Later when that lover has changed his name and an ex-boyfriend has come out to me as a lesbian I go to visit my best friend's sister-turned-brother-turned-sister-again and she tells me about the blessing of having many names and using them all at once. — M.J. Kaufman

To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother. — Barry Humphries

I always prayed the same way at night: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Please bless my mother, father, sister, everyone in the word, and me. And please make my father quit drinking."
As a child growing up in a family battling alcoholism, this is what I know: Something bad is coming; it always does. I can't ask for help; I'm too ashamed. I can't talk about our secrets; no one understands. I can't trust anyone; they always leave.
Questions bounced off my self-constructed wall of values
a barricade I'd made from the fears I'd pushed into my darkness.
How could Ryan, a professional baseball player, really resist all those women? How could I really trust Jerry, my childhood friend? I'd barely awakened to sex and already boys were the seventh wonder of the world. Did anyone really trust another person? I needed proof. That proof hadn't revealed itself ... yet. — Pamela Taeuffer

When my mother died, my father was in a crisis, my sister was in a crisis, everyone was in a crisis. I went round the night my mother was lying in the kitchen, and I organised everything, from the undertaker to the funeral ... I looked after everybody, I sorted it all out and I've done so ever since. — Stuart Rose

Fucker, I though to myself. So irritated by a stare!
I wonder what your reaction would have been if you had lived under occupation for as many years as I had, or if your shopping rights, like all of your other rights, were violated day and night, or if the olive trees in your grandfather's orchards had been uprooted, or if your village had been bulldozed, or if your house had been demolished, or if your sister could not reach her school, or if your brother had been given three life sentences, or if your mother had given birth at a checkpoint, or if you had stood in a line for days in the hot August summers waiting for your work permit, or if you could not reach your beloved ones in Arab East Jerusalem....
A stare, and you lose your mind! — Suad Amiry

Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright. Round yon Virgin Mother and Child. Holy Infant so tender and mild. Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace. — Joseph Mohr

If every mother in the United States could wrap her mind around her true value as a woman and mother, her life would never be the same. We would wake up every morning excited for the day rather feeling as though we'd been hit by a truck during the night. We would talk differently to our kids, fret less about our husbands' annoying habits, and speak with greater tenderness and clarity. We would find more contentment in our relationships, let means remarks roll off our backs, and leave work feeling confident in the job we performed. And best of all - we wouldn't obsess about our weight (can you imagine?), physical fitness, or what kind of home we live in. We would live a kinda of home we live in. We would live free from superficial needs because we would know deep in our hearts what we need and more importantly, what we don't need. Each of us would live a life of extraordinary freedom. — Meg Meeker

French parents do offer a few sleep tips. They almost all say that in the early months, they kept their babies with them in the light during the day, even for naps, and put them to bed in the dark at night. And almost all say that, from birth, they carefully "observed" their babies, and then followed the babies' own "rhythms." French parents talk so much about rhythm, you'd think they were starting rock bands, not raising kids. "From zero to six months, the best is to respect the rhythms of their sleep," explains Alexandra, the mother whose babies slept through the night practically from birth. — Pamela Druckerman

I give in and light another cigarette even though last night the surgeon general came on the television set and shook his finger at everybody, trying to convince us that smoking will kill us. But Mother once told me tongue kissing would turn me blind and I'm starting to think it's all just a big plot between the surgeon general and Mother to make sure no one ever has any fun. — Kathryn Stockett

When prayers were ended, and his Mother had wished him good-night with that long steady look of hers which conveyed no expression of the tenderness that was in her heart, but yet had all the intensity of a blessing. — Elizabeth Gaskell

And as Sean climbs into bed and closes his eyes, Mother comes, riding astride a lion the size of a house, blowing a clarion from a horn made out of a hollowed-out elephant's tusk. Her eyes have a faint crimson glow from the lasers that are mounted behind her irises, ready to fire at will.

'I touched a prince's chest today and made his heart stop,' she says. 'I'll do it again if I have to: they'll see what happens if anyone gets in my way. Good night, my son. Remember that I will always keep you safe; that I am always everywhere and always here.'

'Good night, Mom,' Sean says, and falls asleep.

And Mother recedes, wise and beautiful and strong, a genius and a hero, a punisher of thieves and a slayer of wicked men, to watch over her son in all her different versions. — Dexter Palmer

The Presence, indeed, was with him, and he felt it, but he knew it only as the wind and shadow, the sky and closed daisies: in all these things and the rest it took shape that it might come near him. Yea, the Presence was in his very soul, else he could never have rejoiced in friend, or desired ghost to mother him: still he knew not the Presence. But it was drawing nearer and nearer to his knowledge -- even in sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and flower and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to him, in him, as Life Himself. Then the man would know that in which the child had rejoiced. — George MacDonald

Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them - dog and boy, mother and old man - would feel the same. — David Wroblewski

At Lincoln Center there were always Young People's Concerts, and her class had once gone to one on a Saturday field trip. She had been to concerts before, of course, but it had always been at night, and with her mother. This matinee had a very different feeling to it.( ... ) It was wintertime, and the flu was swirling through the coatrooms of all the private schools of New York. In the darkness a child coughed from time to time, and another child coughed back in response, like two dogs tied in separate yards, barking to each other to keep company throughout the night. — Meg Wolitzer

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy. — Pat Conroy

She remembers blood.
A fine mist which goes deep into her lungs, over her skin and through the air. She remembers a desert at dusk. The sky indigo blue and the fire bright, so bright that she can see everything. Near the fire, in the night, all she knows is chaos wrapped in crimson. All is death and nightmare with a single solitary dancer who smiles cruelly as he moves. He is power and darkness. He is man and beast, silver coin eyes and that face, those claws and the agony of loss.
Time stretches wide; seconds like vast eons swallow up her world. Vince is dead, his mother, his brother and her small son ripped apart and gushing as he/it moves. She is screaming, a howl of agony beyond words, primal and wordless. Still he moves, faster than air, faster than she could ever be. Blood drips from her face as she grunts, running with her lungs on fire and her last remaining hope wrapped in her arms. — Amanda M. Lyons

I feel excitingly ... free. Things were going to happen to me last night that I did not like - and I stopped them. I have never prevented my own doom before. I have never stood in the path of certain unhappiness and told myself - lovingly, like a mother to myself - "No! This unhappiness will not suit you! Turn around and go another way!"
I have previously been resigned to any and all fates ahead - mute and compliant, worried about seeming weird or unfuckable, or about making a fuss. But now things have changed: it seems I am now the kind of girl who can instigate a threesome - then cancel a threesome, then order a cab. I am in charge of me. I can change fates! I can reorder evenings! I can say "Yes" - and then "No!" This is new information to me. I like this information. I like all information about me. I am compiling a dossier. I am my own specialist subject. — Caitlin Moran

Why had I failed to realize the depth of Mary's faith despite all those
letters? She'd certainly done her best to share it. The answer came to me in
the midst of my own faith journey, one that seemed to begin the night my
mother died and was jump-started when I lost David seventeen months later.
Why hadn't I seen it?
Simple. I wasn't looking.
According to Jeremiah 29:13 in the Bible, "You will seek me and find
me when you seek me with all your heart" (NIV). It wasn't about Mary at all. It was about me. It wasn't until my mother's death that I began actively
seeking God. I didn't see Mary's Christian example because I hadn't yet
developed spiritually. I wasn't "there" yet. I didn't recognize true faith
because I didn't have my own. — Mary Potter Kenyon

When I moved to New York out of college, that was my goal. To be a stage actress. And to do dramatic works. Like 'Madea', and 'Night, Mother', and 'Sam Shepard', and all that kind of stuff. That's what I really wanted to do. — Rachael Harris

By the time Bones announced it was Tammy's turn, I'd fallen in love with him all over again. Flowers and jewelry worked for most girls as a romantic gesture, but here I was, misty-eyed at watching him show my mother how to stab the shit out of him. — Jeaniene Frost

On Saturdays I worked all day in Hunter Gaunt's drugstore in Winchester, and then at night, my mother drove me to Front Royal, where I sang pop tunes. — Patsy Cline

You know what your problem is, Justina? You're in desperate need of a good shag. "Not that I'm offering you one myself, mind. My days as a whore ended back in the seventeen hundreds."
The gin was abruptly sucked back into my lungs as I gasped. He did not just tell my mother about his former profession; sweet Jesus, let me have heard incorrectly!
I hadn't, and Bones went right on. " ... But I have a friend who owes me a favor and he could be persuaded to ... Kitten, are you all right?"
I'd stopped breathing as soon as he casually admitted to his prior occupation. Add that to the liquid stuck in my lungs, and no, I wasn't all right. — Jeaniene Frost

I don't give a damn
What anybody says-
If you try
To bend your mind that far,
It disturbs your guts
Which lie right next
To where the soul is housed
In any human body that's been
Screwed by it's mother.
And then all night long
There are screams in the dark
Saying
Mama, don't. — Kathy Evert

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceasless crying: he was alreday forgiving me my shortcomings as a father; he was a distillation of a dozen generations, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the this slip of his ribs. I'd hold him to the window and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky. — Anthony Doerr

They were conscientious, you couldn't deny it, and they were also flabby, heartless sons-of-bitches. In other words, they were well chosen, as mindlessly enthusiastic as any employer could dream of. Sons that would have delighted my mother, worshiping their bosses, if only she could have had one all to herself, a son she could have been proud of in the eyes of the world, a real legitimate son. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Sonnet III: Black Coffin opened wide for all to See

Black Coffin opened wide for all to See,
The lifeless form of one I loved so dear.
O, listen! mournful knells that soon shall be
All night long tolling for the folk to hear.
The lanterns overlight the old churchyard
To watch the coffin lowered into the ground;
Soon Frost shall grasp the turf already hard,
Decay ye have to face without a sound.
But years have pass'd herein do I relate
My dear sweet mother's form within my mind.
Still happiness fills all my heart and state,
As I see my small family so kind.
Love cannot be withheld by death or grave,
It stays alive within the heart so brave. — Timothy Salter

My mother is very religious. She's one of those old ladies that spends her life in the church. She just prays and prays, day and night. We have a very different idea of what religion is. She doesn't understand what my work is about, why I want to make changes in the way we live. She thinks we should be thankful for the little we have and leave well enough alone. I suppose she thinks that if she prays enough, God will come down from the sky with a plate of beans for her to eat.
But I don't think that God say, 'Go to church and pray all day and everything will be fine.' No. For me God says, 'Go out and make the changes that need to be made, and I'll be there to help you.' [p. 30] — Elvia Alvarado

Happy we were then, for we had a good house, and good food, and good work. There was nothing to do outside at night, except chapel, or choir, or penny-readings, sometimes. But even so, we always found plenty to do until bedtime, for if we were not studying or reading, then we were making something out back, or over the mountain singing somewhere. I can remember no time when there was not plenty to be done.
I wonder what has happened in fifty years to change it all ... But when people stop being friends with their mother and fathers, and itching to be out of the house, and going mad for other things to do, I cannot think. It is like an asthma, that comes on a man quickly. He has no notion how he had it, but there it is, and nothing can cure it. — Richard Llewellyn

He had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother. The full weight of everything he had seen that night seemed to fall in upon him as Mrs. Weasley held him to her. His mother's face, his father's voice, the sight of Cedric, dead on the ground all started spinning in his head until he could hardly bear it, until he was screwing up his face against the howl of misery fighting to get out of him. — J.K. Rowling

When he came back, I hid my face within my hands. He said: "Fear nothing. Who has seen our kiss?
Who saw us? The night and the moon."
"And the stars and the first flush of dawn. The moon has seen its visage in the lake, and told it to the water 'neath the willows. The water told it to the rower's oar.
"And the oar has told it to the boat, and the boat has passed the secret to the fisher. Alas! alas! if that were only all! But the fisher told the secret to a woman.
"The fisher told the secret to a woman: my father and my mother and my sisters, and all of Hellas now shall know the tale. — Pierre Louis

I used to play my records aloud until one night my mother was like, "This is too loud. I'm not having it," and so I put on headphones. But the headphones didn't stretch all the way to my bed from the record player, so I had to sleep on the floor in order to hear the records. I slept on the floor right next to the record player until I was probably 19 years old. — Lauryn Hill

I remembered how, as a boy, I would stew over all the things Mama wouldn't do, things other mothers did. Hold my hand when we walked. Sit me up on her lap, read bedtime stories, kiss my face good night. Those things were true enough. But, all those years, I'd been blind to a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me. — Khaled Hosseini

Like her mother and all her mother's people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry night. Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth. — Ann Patchett

Sometimes during the night, your father awakened. He rose from his bed, staggered across the room, and found the strength to raise the window sash. He called your mother's name with what little voice he had, and he called yours, too, and your brother, Joe. And he called for Mickey. At that moment, it seemed, his heart was spilling out, all the guilt and regret. Perhaps he felt the light of death approaching. Perhaps he only knew you were all out there somewhere, in the streets beneath his window. He bent over the ledge. The night was chilly. The wind and damp, in his state, were too much. He was dead before dawn. — Mitch Albom

But the Night Mother is mother to all! It is her voice we follow! Her will! Would you dare risk disobedience? And surely ... punishment? — Marcus Tullius Cicero

You seem to have an uncommon knowledge of young people. May I ask if you are, or have been, a teacher?" "Oh, no!" Mrs. Carey remarked with a smile, "I am just a mother,
that's all! Good night. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

[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

I've wandered as far west as I can go. Sitting now on the sand, I watch the sun blur into an aftermath. Reds finally marrying blues. Soon night will enfold us all. But the light is still not gone, not yet, and by it I can dimly see here my own dark hallway, or maybe it was just a foyer and maybe not dark at all, not in fact brightly lit, an afternoon sun blazing through the lead panes, now detected amidst what amounts to a long column of my yesterdays, towards the end, though not the very end of course, where I had stood at the age of seven, gripping my mother's wrists, trying as hard as I could to keep her from going. — Mark Z. Danielewski

I surveyed the others, who had all stopped in their tracks. So what was the plan, boys? You were all going to get a fuck in? The very definition of sloppy seconds - hell, sloppy thirds and fourths and fifths. Than what? Slit my throat? Leave me for dead? Let some school janitor find me stuffed in a dumpster? You would deny my children their mother for one night of cheap thrills? — J.R. Rain

Since the day that our forefather and mother were exiled out of the garden of Eden, we've been lost, trying to get back in, trying to find oneness with each other and the Lord, trying to find communion, our way home. We've been trying to be found. The truth is that without Christ, we are utterly alone, and our attempts to fill our hours with goodies or texting or work or even ministry are simply futile attempts to assure ourselves that things aren't so bad after all. But at the end of the day, in the middle of the night, and at the end of our lives, without the love and work of Jesus Christ, the God-man, we are alone and we know it - and it terrifies us. Every one of us is standing on that darkened stage, condemned, lost and wandering, needing to be found. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

We had contributed. So had his mother and all the other black mothers who wept at night and saw visions of the gates of hell when they should have been asleep. — Roberto Bolano

By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am. — James Agee

Coming forward with a placating smile, Win handed him a piece of paper. "Of course we would never want to force you into a loveless marriage, dear. But we have put together a list of prospective brides, all of them lovely girls. Won't you take a glance and see if any of them appeals to you?"
Deciding to humor her, Leo looked down at the list. "Marietta Newbury?"
"Yes," Amelia said. "What's wrong with her?"
"I don't like her teeth."
"What about Isabella Charrington?"
"I don't like her mother."
"Lady Blossom Tremaine?"
"I don't like her name."
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Leo, that's not her fault."
"I don't care. I can't have a wife named Blossom. Every night I would feel as if I were calling in one of the cows." Leo lifted his gaze heavenward. "I might as well marry the first woman off the street. Why, I'd be better off with Marks."
Everyone was silent. — Lisa Kleypas

Another year passed on . The waves of time seemed long since to have swept away all trace of poor Mary Barton. But her husband still thought of her, although with a calm and quiet grief, in the silent watches of the night :And Mary would start from her hard-earned sleep,and think in her half dreamy, half awakened state, she saw her mother stand by her bed-side ,as she used to do 'in the days of long-ago'; with shaded candle and an expression of ineffable tenderness, while she looked on her sleeping child. — Elizabeth Gaskell

If you eat an apple from this tree you'll see the biggest event in your life. I know it sounds impossible, but David probably did see how he was going to die. It chased him away. It chased our mother away. To some people, the worst thing to ever happen to them is the biggest thing to ever happen to them. He's not coming back."
"Oh, come on," Tyler said. "I ate one of those apples and I didn't go off screaming into the night."
"You ate an apple?" Claire asked, aghast.
"The night we met. When I found all those apples on my side of the fence."
"What did you see?" she demanded.
"All I saw was you," he said, which made Claire's features go soft as she looked up at him. — Sarah Addison Allen

Like all mothers, mother nature will tuck you safely into bed at night only to come into your room two hours later in a scary mask and threaten you with a nail — Greg Evigan

I must be overtired', Buttercup managed. 'The excitement and all.'
'Rest then', her mother cautioned. 'Terrible things can happen when you're overtired. I was overtired the night your father proposed. — William Goldman

How, I asked, could I have gone my whole life not knowing about my mother? How could I have not known what Keith knew when he saw our house? "It's your mom," Helder said. "Because it's Mom." He sounded firm and knowing and clear. "When a child has an alcoholic father, he sees him drink all day long but he doesn't have a label, a concept. You just know that at night, when the tires make a certain sound in the driveway and the doors slam a certain way, with a certain sound, you just know you need to hide. — Heather Sellers

You're greedy, her mother had said to her quietly, that last night in New York, as she had packed her things. Greedy and selfish. It's not the knowledge you want, you can have that from your journals. you want to be in the newspapers, you want to be Marie Curie, you wat to think you're different from all of us. That all other women are silly and complacent and conventional, except you, brilliant you. — Beatriz Williams

It was time for me to go that Thursday night. We'd just watched Citizen Kane--a throwback to my Cinema 190 class at USC--and it was late. And though a soft, cozy bed in one of the guest rooms sounded much more appealing than driving all the way home, I'd never really wanted to get into the habit of sleeping over at Marlboro Man's house. It was the Pretend-I'm-a-Proper-Country-Club-Girl in me, mixed with a healthy dose of fear that Marlboro Man's mother or grandmother would drop by early in the morning to bring Marlboro Man some warm muffins or some such thing and see my car parked in the driveway. Or even worse, come inside the house, and then I'd have to wrestle with whether or not to volunteer that "I slept in a guest room! I slept in a guest room!", which only would have made me look more guilty. Who needs that? I'd told myself, and vowed never to put myself in that predicament. — Ree Drummond

I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to the light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and yet cannot succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to matter and can't get free. Light flows from substance, makes it beautiful ... — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

One day Turtle had savaged an innocent bowl of batter into something that almost (but not quite) resembled muffins. Her mother, who had a great deal to bear on other fronts which do not enter the scope of this story, except to say that Turtle had three older brothers, each more reprehensible than the last, opened the back door and told Turtle to take herself and her regrettable muffins to her grandmother, and if she had to stay the night, so much the better, as there was going to be a great deal of screaming presently, and Turtle was a bit young to be hearing all the words that Turtle's mother planned to be using. — T. Kingfisher

She asked if she could sleep in my bed that night and I said yes and we went upstairs and lay close together in the narrow bed and I wondered if maybe she missed her mother, and then around halfway through the night Edmond came in saying he was lonely and he lay down too only facing in the other direction since it was the only way he could fit, and then around sunrise Isaac wandered in too wondering where everyone had gone and when he saw us he just smiled a little and went down to the kitchen and brought up the big brown teapot and some mugs on a tray and we all piled together on the bed on top of each other like puppies and drank our tea while the sun streamed in thick and yellow through the window. And — Meg Rosoff

What doesn't kill you leaves disfiguring scars
What doesn't kill you fills you with paralyzing self-hatred
What doesn't kill you makes you an unfit mother
What doesn't kill you makes it all so hard
What doesn't kill you wakes you up in the middle of the night
What doesn't kill you turns you into an alcoholic
What doesn't kill you makes you do unforgivable things to the people you love
What doesn't kill you makes you afraid for the rest of your life
What doesn't kill you might make you kill them — Clementine Von Radics

Wanderers eastward, wanderers west,
Know you why you cannot rest?
'Tis that every mother's son
Travails with a skeleton.
Lie down in the bed of dust;
Bear the fruit that bear you must;
Bring the eternal seed to light,
And morn is all the same as night. — A.E. Housman

Hey"

hey
been trying to meet you
hey
must be a devil between us
or whores in my head
whores at my door
whores in my bed
but hey
where have you been?
if you go i will surely die
we're chained

uh said the man to the lady
uh said the lady to the man she adored
and the whores like a choir
go uh all night
and Mary ain't you tired of this
uh
is
the
sound
that the mother makes when the baby breaks
we're chained — Pixies