Black Mothers Quotes & Sayings

At times I think the truest image of God today is a black inner-city grandmother in the United States or a mother of the disappeared in Argentina or the women who wake up early to make tortillas in refugee camps. They all weep for their children, and in their compassionate tears arises the political action that changes the world. The mothers show us that it is the experience of touching the pain of others that is the key to change. — Jim Wallis

The black and white lemur, the one that relaxes on that branch, they actually have day care, like kindergartens; where all the mothers come together and they put all the babies into this one nest and they let dad watch it while they go out and have food and have a good time and then they come back in a few hours. We've never seen that in other primates. — Patricia Wright

The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.

I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go. — Laurie Perez

I don't know how Frank presented the old Mothers, since I never read the book. There might be some opinions on what he said, but I - or anyone else - could not make any corrections to anything Frank did. — Jimmy Carl Black

The snowmen stood in bunches, in families, and the breeze generated by the car snatched at their striped scarves. Snowmen fathers and snowgirl mothers with their snowchildren and snowpuppies. Top hats were in abundance, as were corncob pipes and carrot noses. They waved the crooked sticks of their arms, saluting Mr. Manx, Wayne, and NOS4A2 as they went by. The black coals of their eyes gleamed, darker than the night, brighter than the stars. — Joe Hill

I think that the old Mothers started that trend of rehearsing long hours. We went as long as the later bands did except we didn't get paid for it like they did. — Jimmy Carl Black

There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn't exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs - dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glandular riot in malarial air into poetic reveries that ceased entirely once they got back home. — Jeffrey Eugenides

At conferences, black boys were assembled. At schools we were herded into auditoriums. At home, mothers summoned us to dinner tables, and there they delivered the news: Our time was short. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think a lot of the Mothers stuff that we recorded was written while we were on the road. — Jimmy Carl Black

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid. — John Pilger

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about. — Toni Morrison

I know something happens between the time our mothers and fathers and teachers and mentors send us out into the world telling us, "The world is yours," and "You are beautiful," and "You can be anything," and the time we return to them.

Something happens when people tell me I have a pretty face, ignoring me from the neck down. When I watch the news and see unarmed black men and women shot dead over and over, it's kind of hard to believe this world is mine.

Sometimes it feels like I leave home a whole person, sent off with kisses from Mom, who is hanging her every hope on my future. By the time I get home I feel like my soul has been shattered into a million pieces.

Mom's love repairs me. — Renee Watson

It is I who have watched over thee, life after life, in the tenderness of many mothers! See in My gaze the two black eyes, the lost beautiful eyes, thou seekest! — Paramahansa Yogananda

[ ... ] Wondering why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience - names they could never live up to - and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation - crosses they'd always have to bear. — Jodi Picoult

We never got anything out of the recordings. I'm still as broke as I was when I was with the Mothers. — Jimmy Carl Black

As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity on both counts. — Shirley Chisholm

For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout's gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller's property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.
And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death - but kindness? — Hanya Yanagihara

Some never spoke another word. Some never married. Some couldn't look at a woman again, even their own mothers and sisters. Some wanted to touch and hold lovers, but their arms could not embrace. — Daniel Black

One of my brothers in my adopted family converted to Islam and I love him with all my heart. I have Muslim women who understand my pain and they give me lots of love and support. But what Black Americans never think about is that the African version of Islam is totally different from American Islam. They've never seen mothers doused in gasoline and set on fire for 'religious' reasons. So they don't know what I'm talking about. — Kola Boof

Long after Paige disappears into the clouds, I turn around, looking for my mother. It's not that I don't care about her. It's just that our relationship is more complicated than the usual daughter-mother relationship. The rosy love I'm supposed to feel for her is slashed with black and splattered with various shades of gray. — Susan Ee

All mothers worry, but Black mothers, we have to worry a little bit more. — Jodi Picoult

In place of negative falsification, we have nurtured, in the past thirty years, a new fetishization. Black female protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful; they are sexually voracious and unafraid; they take the unreal forms of earth mothers, African queens, divas, spirits of history; they process grandly through novels thick with a breed of greeting-card lyricism. They have little of the complexity, the flaws and uncertainties, depth and beauty of Janie Crawford and the novel she springs from. — Zadie Smith

We are not a Zappa cover band. We only play Frank's songs that were recorded by the Mothers of Invention and I think a lot of those songs were complex. — Jimmy Carl Black

The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers
a great pity, on both counts. It is not too late to complete the work they left undone. Today, here, we should start to do so. — Shirley Chisholm

I imagined the sound of whips on black backs and the roar of the overseer over the cry of mothers being separated from their babies. I pulled on all the strength I had not to shot out every valuable leaded pane of glass in that stinking house. — Linda Leigh Hargrove

That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl--and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor's house--was a slap in Mary-Love's face. She decided, without saying anything more to James, to wreck Grace's perfection of happiness. Grace would learn that she, Mary-Love, was the source of all felicity within the Caskey family. — Michael McDowell

While they suffered an irreparable loss, my children are still fortunate. Nothing will bring their father back, but our circumstances have softened the blow. This is not the case for many children facing heartbreaking difficulties. Two out of ten U.S. children of all backgrounds live in poverty, and one-third of black and close to one-third of Latino children are poor. Forty-three percent of children of single mothers live in poverty. More than two and a half million children have a parent in jail. Many children face serious illness, neglect, abuse, or homelessness. These extreme levels of harm and deprivation can impede children's intellectual, social, emotional, and academic development. We — Sheryl Sandberg

The 'medium' is unaware of its attractiveness, that's all. Everyone loves comics. I've proven this to my own satisfaction by handing them out to acountants, insurance brokers, hairdressers, mothers of children, black belts, pop stars, taxi drivers, painters, lesbians, doctors etc. etc. The X-Files, Buffy, the Matrix, X-Men - mainstream culture is not what it once was when science fiction and comics fans huddled in cellars like Gnostic Christians dodging the Romans. We should come up into the light soon before we suffocate. — Grant Morrison

A black raven flew past me and landed on the back of the couch.
Roman slapped his hand over his face.
"There you are," the raven said in Evdokia's voice. "Ungrateful son."
"Here we go ... " Roman muttered.
"Eighteen hours in labor and that's what I get. He can't even pick up the phone to talk to his own mother."
"Mother, can't you see I have people here?"
"I bet if their mothers called them, they would pick up."
That would be a neat trick for both of us. Sadly, dead mothers didn't come back to life, even in post-Shift Atlanta.
"Nice to see you, Roman." I grabbed Curran by the hand.
The bird swiveled toward me. "Katya!"
Oh no.
"Don't you leave. I need to talk to you."
"Got to go, bye! — Ilona Andrews

Don't tell thin women to eat a cheeseburger. Don't tell fat women to put down the fork. Don't tell underweight men to bulk up. Don't tell women with facial hair to wax, don't tell uncircumcised men they're gross, don't tell muscular women to go easy on the dead-lift, don't tell dark-skinned women to bleach their vagina, don't tell black women to relax their hair, don't tell flat-chested women to get breast implants, don't tell "apple-shaped" women what's "flattering," don't tell mothers to hide their stretch marks, and don't tell people whose toes you don't approve of not to wear flip-flops. And so on, etc, etc, in every iteration until the mountains crumble to the sea. Basically, just go ahead and CEASE telling other human beings what they "should" and "shouldn't" do with their bodies unless a) you are their doctor, or b) SOMEBODY GODDAMN ASKED YOU. — Lindy West

God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers. — Will Leamon

Judged by the evolving nineteenth-century ideology of femininity, which emphasized women's roles as nurturing mothers and gentle companions and housekeepers for their husbands, Black women were practically anomalies. Though — Angela Y. Davis

How big are souls anyway? asked Coraline.
The other mother sat down at the kitchen table and leaned against the back wall, saying nothing. She picked at her teeth with a long crimson-varnished fingernail, then she tapped the finger, gently, tap-tap-tap against the polished black surface of her black button eyes. — Neil Gaiman

Painter"
"I said you are only keeping me here
in the hospital, lying to my parents
and saying I am madder than I am,
because you only want to keep me here,
squeezing my last dollar to the pennies
I'm saner than anyone in the hospital.
I had to say what every madman says
a black phrase, the sleep of reason mothers monsters ...
When I am painting the canvas is a person;
all I do, each blot and line's alive,
when I am finished, it is shit on the canvas ...
But in his sketches more finished than his oils,
sketches made after he did those masterpieces,
constable can make us see the breeze ... — Robert Lowell

I went to work with a guy named Matt Fuller, who was a Mothers fan, and low and behold, Arthur was working for him also. We worked together for about six months and decided to strike out on our own. — Jimmy Carl Black

Blaming Black mothers, then, is a way of subjugating the Black race as a whole. At the same time, devaluing motherhood is particularly damaging to Black women. — Dorothy Roberts

In a black and white world, Chase and I would never end up together - our mothers had ensured that - but in that small bathroom, under the harsh fluorescent lights, we dragged each other deeper into the gray - the messy, guilt-ridden space that sat between right and wrong. — R.S. Grey

CHILDHOOD I That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, nobler than Mexican and Flemish fables; his domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celt. At the border of the forest - dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare, - the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields, nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea; baby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens, - young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage, little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. What boredom, the hour of the "dear body" and "dear heart." II — Arthur Rimbaud

And I can't die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I'm a cracked plate. — Zora Neale Hurston

Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens. — Ella Baker

The boys wore black T-shirts, dark hoodies and permanent sneers and their hair was an open rebellion against society and interfering mothers. - Zombiekins — Kevin Bolger

With this understanding of love's meaning it is clear that more often than not slavery made it all but impossible for black people to love one another. When emotional ties were established between individuals, when children were born to enslaved mothers and fathers, these attachments were often severed. No matter the tenderness of connection, it was often overshadowed by the trauma of abandonment and loss. — Bell Hooks

By 1971, a quarter of the white students were in private schools, the white families paying tuition many could scarcely afford. Mothers went back to work to help cover tuition, "spent all their savings and forfeited luxuries and necessities in life," some splitting their children up and enduring the "expense and inconvenience of transporting the children long distances to and from school," according to the Mississippi-born scholar Mark Lowry, to avoid having their children sit in the same classroom with black children. In — Isabel Wilkerson

Do not mistake me, Inrithi. In this much Conphas is right. You are all staggering drunks to me. Boys who would play at war when you should kennel with your mothers. You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill not daring. It is not a trial of souls, nor the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.
You have offered me war, and I have accepted. Nothing more. I will not regret your losses. I will not bow my head before your funeral pyres. I will not rejoice at your triumphs. But I have taken the wager. I will suffer with you. I will put Fanim to the sword, and drive their wives and children to the slaughter. And when I sleep, I will dream of their lamentations and be glad of heart. — R. Scott Bakker

Belfastas uncivilised as ever
savage black mothers in houses of dark red brick, friendly manufacturers too drunk to entertain you when you arrive. It amuses me till I get tired. — E. M. Forster

I keep saying that i wish our black women would not stop raising their sons to be like the niggas who left them. I see mothers covering for their deadbeat sons, putting some other child's mother through the same shit, her babyfather put her through.
We have spent the last few decades blaming absentee fathers for the lack of "graces" among our young men forgetting that they are raised by women. Women have always been other women's worst enemies. Maybe we need to start asking our mothers, what have they been doing wrong. Trying to smother the only man who won't leave them cause he can't, hes biologically linked to her. Trying to make up for the men who dumped her.
Raising monstrous, spoiled brats and then unleashing them on the female population. What we have today is a culture of men raised like daughters who do not know how to be a partner, a man and a father. — Crystal Evans

No! No!" Falling to his knees, Ebenezer tried to grab the black robe, but he felt nothing. "Please hear me. I'm not the man I was. I will not be that man again. Why show me these things if I'm beyond all hope?" The angel was relentless in his silent demand. Ebenezer sat back on his heels, resigned. "I've watched an innocent man crucified. Innocent children slaughtered. Mothers grieving for their dead sons. I guess nothing you show me now really matters." He took a deep breath and stood next to the slab of stone. He reached over the body and pulled back the shroud. He thought himself prepared, but he wasn't. He felt the blood drain from his face. Ebenezer was ready to see himself on that cold stone, but not the face before him. There, in what seemed peaceful sleep, was the Man whom Ebenezer loved. He fell back as he stared at Jesus. Recovering, he dropped to his knees. He was quiet for a moment, then said, "It should have been me. It should have been me. — Marianne Jordan

The right wing of the Republican party
which controlled the White House from 1980 to 1992, crucial years in the evolution of motherhood
hated the women's movement and believed all women, with the possible exception of Phyllis Schlafly, should remain in the kitchen on their knees polishing their husband's shoes and golf clubs while teaching their kids that Darwin was a very bad man. Unless the mothers were poor and black
those moms had to get back to work ASAP, because by staying home they were wrecking the country. — Susan Douglas

Drink a bottle of cheap champagne. Mix with orange juice. A large Glenmorangie. Milk and blackish toast. Half a bottle of Blue Nun. Budweiser. Budweiser. Go to church. Say I do etc. Budweiser. Murphy's. Jameson. Budweiser. Stella. Stella. Cake. Stella. Jameson. Stella. Vodka and orange. Vodka and black. Speech, speech. Vodka. Vodka. Double Jameson. Double vodka. Double vodka. Get carry-outs of barley wine. Say goodbye to aunties. Uncles. Mothers etc. Stop car on M18. Vomit. Sleep. Dream of dim-lit hallways and a black door. Wake up between Scarborough and Robin Hood's Bay. Her not saying much. Driving. — Dean Lilleyman

Poor black families were "immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on," wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat. But large-scale social transformations - the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them - had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit "kin dependence" by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives. — Matthew Desmond

I've grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains - good, potent female villains. Not ill-tempered women who scheme about landing good men and better shoes (as if we had nothing more interesting to war over), not chilly WASP mothers (emotionally distant isn't necessarily evil), not soapy vixens (merely bitchy doesn't qualify either). I'm talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don't tell me you don't know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves - to the point of almost parodic encouragement - we've left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids. — Gillian Flynn

She'd given it away once; she never would again. Life took things from you: mothers, friends, sometimes even choices. But that wasn't the same as giving parts of yourself away. It was her voice to use: to say no and yes and "I love you" with, to sing with, even to hold silent. — Jennifer Mason-Black

Far too many black men who praise their own mother feel less accounted to the mothers of their own children. — Patricia Hill Collins

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