Quotes & Sayings About Being A Mother To A Daughter

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular. And you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings as vast as your own, who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddys in the nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks to loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress making, and knows inside herself that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.
Slavery is the same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and describes this world in essential texts. A world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave. Hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

But he was an only child and an only son, and for a mother in such a position it is not always easy to accept that another woman will eventually enter her son's life and, if all goes according to plan - the plan being that of the other woman - take him away. This common conflict, so understandable and so poignant, is played out time and time again, and almost always with the same painful result: Mother loses. It is so, of course, if Mother is overt in her attempt to put off the almost inevitable; if she is covert, then she stands a chance, admittedly a remote one, of introducing into her son's mind a germ of doubt that the woman he has chosen might not be the right one for him. That takes skill, and boundless patience, but it is a course fraught with dangers for the relationship between mother and future daughter-in-law, let alone for that between mother and son. — Alexander McCall Smith

"Mom, Arnie Welsh keeps calling me a geek. He says it like it's a bad thing. Is being a geek a bad thing?"
"Of course not, Soda Pop. And don't listen to labels. They don't matter."
"What are labels?"
"It's an imaginery sticker people slap on you with the word they think you are written on it. It doesn't matter who they think you are. It matters who you think you are."
"I think I might be a geek."
She laughed. "Then you be a geek. Just be whatever makes you happy, Soda Pop, and I'll be happy too. — Samantha Young

I'm missing my baby's first swim lesson. If I am at my daughter's debut in her school musical, I am missing Sandra Oh's last scene ever being filmed at Grey's Anatomy. If I am succeeding at one, I am inevitably failing at the other. That is the trade-off. That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel 100 percent okay, you never get your sea legs, you are always a little nauseous. Something is always lost. Something is always missing. And yet. I want my daughters to see me and know me as a woman who works. I want that example set for them. — Shonda Rhimes

I've got to go." He hung up suddenly as if afraid of being caught. His mom had probably come into the room. The Zeemans had four sons and a daughter. The sons were all six feet or above. The daughter was five nine. They were all over twenty-one. And they were all scared of their mother. Not literally scared, but Charlotte Zeeman wore the pants in the family. One family dinner and I knew that. I — Laurell K. Hamilton

I've decided to take the day off. From myself. Today, I will not feel behind. I will not worry about being a better wife, mother, daughter, housekeeper, or writer. I'm not making a fancy dinner. I'll be having quite an ordinary day, but I'll be thinking and thanking-instead of fretting and fixing. We all need one day a year when we meet our own expectations and allow the world to be as it is instead of exactly how we would like it to be. — Elizabeth Bard

When my daughter Zulekha was born, I was at the pinnacle of my working life as a model, and I pulled myself in two trying to cope with being both a mother and a career girl. — Iman

We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. — Nora Ephron

I fully intend to make amends and get back to being a good mother, wife, daughter, and friend. — Suzy Favor Hamilton

Fury is an entirely appropriate response to a system that sends young people to kill other young people in a war that never should have been waged. Yet the American Right is forever trying to pathologise anger as something menacing and abnormal, dismissing war opponents as hateful and, in the latest slur, wild-eyed. This is much harder to do when victims of wars begin to speak for themselves: no one questions the wildness in the eyes of a mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter, or the fury of a soldier who knows that he is being asked to kill, and to die, needlessly. — Naomi Klein

What a joke, coming from a woman who worked for the fashion industry. Really. Starving yourself to fit into a size zero - why did that size even exist? Zero referred to the absence of something, but what did it mean in terms of a model's measurements? Her fat? Or her presence? How much could you cut away before the person herself vanished? It was hypocritical, that's what it was. I said as much, adding, If you're so keen on me being healthy then you should have no problem accepting me for the way I am. That's what's healthy, Mom. Not being focused on all this freaky weight-loss stuff. — Nenia Campbell

There's this unspoken history that exists between any mother and daughter, no matter how deep and loving the bond is, twenty-five years of being raised by someone, there's a kind of deep history which means that there are shortcuts to getting on each other's nerves. — Stephen Karam

But I've discovered being a writer is an ongoing apprenticeship, just like everything else in life that matters to me-being a mother, a wife, a daughter, or simply a woman alive in the world, content to be myself. Today at thirty-two, I am glad to wake up each day and begin. — Sue Monk Kidd

Over 13 percent of women in college have reported being a victim of stalking during the school year, and one out of every five college women has reported being sexually assaulted. It is simple to talk about statistics. It is more difficult to remember that each number is a victim and represents a daughter, a sister or a friend. — Gwen Moore

My daughter Gabby very kindly once said that she thinks I was a better mother because I was doing a job I loved. I now think guilt is a universal part of being a mother. I used to think it was Jewish-mother guilt but now I think it is working-mother guilt. — Donna Karan

The problem is that your daughter has given her heart to a 15-year-old boy, and a 15-year-old boy does not yet qualify as a human being. — Bill Cosby

When my mother was alive, I was the daughter first and everything else second ... That's what made her death so painful. My mother was a big part of my life and a big reason why I did what I did. I've always derived a lot of energy from being a good daughter ... When she was gone, I suddenly thought, Why am I doing this? For whom? Losing my mom was really hard on me. I remember going to the Academy Awards shortly after she died and thinking, Well I'm all dressed up, and my mother won't see me. — Goldie Hawn

Awful to think she was a disapproving mother. Awful to wonder-had she always frightened Amy? Is that why the girl had grown up so fearful, always ducking her head? It was bewildering to Isablle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious. But it was a terrible feeling. More terrible than having Avery Clark forget to come to her house. Knowing that her child had grown up frightened. Except it was cockeyed, all backwards, because, thought Isabelle, glancing back at her daughter, I've been frightened of you. — Elizabeth Strout

Her mother had called, and being a good daughter was as convenient an excuse as any. Anything to avoid the library. — Joseph Fink

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the 1990s and early 1980s was the dominant understanding of professionals characterised the sex abuser as a pathetic person who had been denied sex and warmth by his wife, who in turn denied warmth to her daughters. Out of this dysfunctional triad grew the far-too-cosy incest dyad. Simply diagnosed, relying on the signs: alcoholic father, cold distant mother, provocative daughter. Simply resolved, because everyone would want to stop, to return to the functioning family where mum and dad had sex and daughter concentrated on her exams. Professionals really believed for a while that sex offenders would want to stop what they were doing. They thought if abuse were decriminalised, abusers would seek help. The survivors knew different. P5 — Beatrix Campbell

Holding his daughter close with one arm, he pointed toward the distant horizon. "As far as you can see - it all belongs to you, Faith. Someday, I'll take you to the top of a windmill and teach you to dream. When you reach for some of those dreams, you might fall ... but your mother and I will be there to catch you because that's what love means: always being there. I love you, little girl." He pressed a kiss to his daughter's cheek. "So much ... it hurts. But I reckon that's part of love, too."
-Dallas — Lorraine Heath

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it. — Josephine Tey

It must be very hard to be a mother. All those years of knowing everything about your daughter, of dressing her and bathing her and being intimately acquainted with her every need and want, and then one day you wake up and realize you don't even know what kind of dress to buy her at Clery's. — Jessie Ann Foley

Sometimes being a supportive friend to her mother is the only way for the daughter to get positive strokes from Mom. The daughter may fall into the friend role willingly, not even realizing there is something terribly wrong with the arrangement until much later in life. — Karyl McBride

Women not only get violated, but then we take on the struggle to end it too ... As a man, how could the destruction of women be anything to you but devastating? Think about the fact that the women being hurt are your mothers, daughters, sisters. — Eve Ensler

Being a very bad daughter, I never really took time to sit down and listen to my mother's story, and she passed away in 2003. I became very guilty and began to spend a lot of time with older people. I listened carefully to their stories. — Mabel Cheung

How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother's deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn't tell, or told stories that weren't entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form. — Pamela Erens

My daughter has a problem picking things up in her room. So if you leave your clothes on the floor, we put them in a trash bag. She has to earn them back by being tidy. I'm a disciplinarian. Guy's the spoiler. — Madonna Ciccone

What was the payoff? It obviously kept me in my cozy zone of being in control, being a good mother, with a good daughter. Most of all, I realize, is that it allowed me to maintain the lie that she was healed, that Nick hadn't permanently damaged her, that I'd truly saved her. Because if I did, if there was no lasting residue of him, it meant that the denial that kept me in the marriage long enough for him to hurt her didn't help create the situation she's in now.
The person who I worked hardest to keep safe seems to have been me. — Claire Fontaine

When, in the street, I see a mother walking with her grown-up daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mother's pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted her daughter's company; and the iron discipline she imposes on herself, to muffle and conceal this joy. — Helen Garner

She had been bullied and tormented by Leena for a long time and she wasn't going to take it anymore. She was tired of being pushed around. She wanted to be strong for herself and be the type of person who her daughter would've wanted to have as a mother. — Valenciya Lyons

Our world has created a false unrealistic image of what women are supposed to look like and act like. But the truth is that every woman was not created by God to be skinny, with a flawless complexion and long flowing hair. Not every woman was intended to juggle a career as well as all of the other duties of being a wife, mother, citizen, and daughter. Single women should not be made to feel they are missing somenthing because they are not married. Married women should not be made to feel they must have a career to be complete. We must have the freedom to be our individual selves. — Joyce Meyer

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg.
Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter ... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold ... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle. — Alan Moore

Like its author, this book is dedicated to Jen Schwalbach - the gorgeous mother of my child, the seductive temptress who keeps me faithful, and the friend I've always had the most fun with. My best friend, even.
Also quite like the author, this book is additionally dedicated to Jen Schwalbach asshole.
Everything above also applies here, obviously, except the "mother of my child" part: referencing my kid and my wife's brown eye in the same sentiment might come off as crude or something.
(And I have a heart: Please don't go telling my kid you read in her old man's book that she's some kinda Butt-Baby. She's gonna have a hard enough time being Silent Bob's daughter - the daughter of the "Too Fat to Fly" guy.
Also: Pleas don't tell my daughter I dedicated tge vook to her mother's sphincter. That'd be weird) — Kevin Smith