Quotes & Sayings About Daughters Without Mothers

The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts
a child
as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the dependent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. — Mother Teresa

On this walk I'd had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother's influence. I understood now: the things that my mother had found made her happy were not the same as the things that made me happy. And I understood: that was okay. — Aspen Matis

Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult. — Louise Erdrich

Mothers and daughters share a special bond." "I never knew how special until it wasn't there anymore. I'm twenty-seven, and when something good or bad happens in my life, I still wonder what my mom would think. I've lived more of my life without her than with her, but it still matters. — Barbara Freethy

We are born haunted, he said, his voice weak, but still clear. Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don't remember. We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire. But mostly, said Lord Jim, we are haunted by ourselves. — Jonathan Evison

There has been no major revolution in modern history without intellectuals; conversely there has been no major counterrevolutionary movement without intellectuals. Intellectuals have been the fathers and mothers of movements, and of course sons and daughters, even nephews and nieces. — Edward W. Said

My mother is not evil, Faith reminded herself. She is just a perfectly sensible snake, protecting her eggs and making her way in the world as best she can. — Frances Hardinge

I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Every session I had no fewer than sixteen girls with "allergies" to dairy and wheat - cheese and bread basically - but also to garlic, eggplant, corn, and nuts. They had cleverly developed "allergies," I believe, to the foods they had seen their own mothers fearing and loathing as diet fads passed through their homes. I could've strangled their mothers for saddling these girls with the idea that food is an enemy - some of them only eight years old and already weird about wanting a piece of bread - and I would've liked to bludgeon them, too, for forcing me to participate in their young daughters' fucked-up relationship with food. — Gabrielle Hamilton

She was a monster, but she was my monster. — Jeanette Winterson

I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can't live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers' hearts. — Alice Walker

You must go further than I did," Nedra said. "You know that."
"Further?"
"With your life. You must become free."
She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone. — James Salter

You don't belong here if you are unhappy," she continued. "Your mother makes you hateful, and you make her hateful. It doesn't matter if she's your mother. It's an accident of birth. It doesn't have to mean so much." ... "You belong where you have the best chance of being happy ... — Laura Moriarty

She'd been a beautiful woman in her day, delicate and trim, blue-eyed and fair-haired. There was a certain power beautiful mothers held over there less beautiful daughters. Even at seventy-four, with a limp from a hip replacement, Margaret could still enter a room and fill it like perfume. Josey could never do that. The closest she ever came was the attention she used to receive when she pitched legendary fits in public when she was young. But that was making people look at her for all the wrong reasons. — Sarah Addison Allen

We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving ... We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins ... We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers ... We are the daughters of the feminists who said, "You can be anything," and we heard, "You have to be everything. — Courtney Martin

Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again.
"I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you."
I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

It is the liveliest time in life, the happiest of the irresponsible times in life. Mothers echo its happiness - nothing is like a mother who has a son home from college, except another mother with a son home from college. Bloom does actually come upon these mothers; it is a visible thing; and they run like girls, walk like athletes, laugh like sycophants. Yet they give up their sons to the daughters of other mothers, and find it proud rapture enough to be allowed to sit and watch. — Booth Tarkington

I missed my one true friend, my mother. She and I were close in a way I don't think many other mothers and daughters were. I slept beside her every night of my childhood: so near to her back, I could probably sketch the constellation of moles and freckles on her skin there. When I was a very little girl, every morning I would wake before her and arrange myself so that when she woke, we were eye-to-eye. I miss her, with a never-ending ache that I did not think was possible, that crowds out any other feeling and certainly all reason, and any good sense. — Kaitlyn Greenidge

Not every daughter mourns the loss of a mother. — Rasmenia Massoud

Madlen came to sit beside her on the bed. "Lady Queen," she said with her own particular brand of rough gentleness. "It is not the job of the child to protect her mother. It's the mother's job to protect the child. By allowing your mother to protect you, you gave her a gift. Do you understand me? — Kristin Cashore

Women, he would say, are not Muses. Muses are Muses. To confuse one with the other is to mistake the Devouring Void for the Seminal Light. Earthly Women and the Muses are ancient, sworn enemies. The battlefield is the Creative Male. On the one side is the encampment of Discordia, of Diana, of Venus located in his Heart and in his Groin. On the other is the Bastion of Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania, in his Brain and in his Mind. The Muses are tolerant and understanding of border raids, skirmishes, and harassing maneuvers. Throughout the history of the Male Light, there have been few painters, few writers, who have not had a She Who Must Be Accommodated. For some it was their mothers. For many their wives, their mistresses, their girlfriends. For many it was their daughters, a favourite waitress, a stripper, a whore. To the Muses, they are all one. Mother, whore, wife, daughter, stripper, waitress, mistress, girlfriend. — Dave Sim

There isn't an equation that can confirm something as self-evident (to us humans) as "muggy weather is uncomfortable" or "mothers are older than their daughters." There has been some progress made in translating this sort of information into mathematical logic, but to catalog the common sense of a four-year-old child would require hundreds of millions of lines of computer code. As Voltaire once said, "Common sense is not so common. — Michio Kaku

I'm the father of three daughters, and they're all highly trained professionals. Two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point. — Tom Brokaw

No matter what you read or hear, no matter what the difference of circumstances you observe in the lives of women about you, it is important for you Latter-day Saint women to understand that the Lord holds motherhood and mothers sacred and in the highest esteem. He has entrusted to his daughters the great responsibility of bearing and nurturing children ... There is divinity in each new life. — Spencer W. Kimball

He looked at his face carefully in the glass, put a big dab of lather on each cheek-bone. "It's an honest face. It's a face any woman would be safe with."
"She'd never seen it."
"She should have. All women should see it. It's a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their daughters about this face. — Ernest Hemingway,

It was unthinkable. Unmarried daughters didn't go off to live unprotected on their own in a foreign place. They lived at home with their mothers, and when there was no mother, with their sisters, and when there were no sisters, with their brothers. — Sue Monk Kidd

It could not have been easy for Mother, an only child, to grow up without a father and with a mother who was remote. Photos of her as a child show her extremely dressed up
Cornie's beautiful little doll. But a daughter, unlike a doll, grows up, and might fall in love with and marry someone her mother does not like; she becomes an individual with her own ideas. — Cornelia Maude Spelman

As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beating of my heart. I cannot now imagine a life without her. — Kristin Hannah

Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.

Childhood is a wilderness. — Aspen Matis

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. — Amy Tan

One morning as I was leaving, the director said I didn't have to leave the set anymore. What happened? Why did they change their ways of treating me? I came to the realization that it was because I had a mother. My mother spoke highly of me, and to me. But more important, whether they met her or simply heard about her, she was there with me. She had my back, supported me. This is the role of the mother, and in that visit I really saw clearly, and for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known. In Stockholm, my mother shed her protective love down around me and without knowing why people sensed that I had value. — Maya Angelou

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

Without you, African mother, there would have been no us--African fathers, sons and daughters. Do we need to say any more African mothers, our own true goddesses! Let us praise you to the highest, telling the world about your righteousness. Let us tell the entire universe about your sacredness African woman. — Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan

My arrival
Her womb's delight
Her existence
My living light
Her wounds
My scars
Her skies
My stars
Her days
My hours
Her strength
My powers
I breathe my name
Being her child
Without mother
Life's beguiled
From the poem 'Mother — Munia Khan

An unmentored daughter is an unnurtured daughter, unnurtured in the strength she needs to Survive as an original woman in this world. Daughters, as compared to sons in a hetero-relational family, are more undernurtured in all ways by mothers and pressured prematurely to become nurturers of others - mostly of men. What also happens in this context, as Denice Yanni has pointed out, is "a silencing of woman's own needs for nurturing by making her the primary nurturer. — Janice G. Raymond

Whosoever does not believe in the existence of a sixth sense has clearly not regarded their own mother. How it is they know all they know about you, even those secrets you locked away so tightly in the most hidden compartments of your heart, remains one of the great mysteries of the world. And they don't just know - they know instantly. — Narissa Doumani

My beloved has arrived, but rather than greeting him,
All I can do is bite the corner of my apron with a blank expression-
What an awkward woman am I.
My heart has longed for him as hugely and openly as a full moon
But instead I narrow my eyes, and my glance to him
Is sharp and narrow as the crescent moon.
But then, I'm not the only one who behaves this way.
My mother and my mother's mother were as silly and stumbling as I am when they were girls ...
Still, the love from my heart is overflowing,
As bright and crimson as the heated metal in a blacksmith's forge. — Kim Dong Hwa

I think mothers get a raw deal in American culture, so I've been defending them. I have three daughters, and I know that as they become mothers, they got a lot more gentle towards me! — Tyne Daly

It seems to me that if God felt it best to delay marriage into the latter part of your twenties, He would also see fit to delay the hormonal urge to want to have sex. Or perhaps it was never His intent to delay marriage in an effort to "become more independent," "enjoy singlehood," and "build our careers. — Vicki Courtney

Many daughters may never have given themselves permission to even 'consider' changing the relationship with their mothers, because they didn't think they had the right to do it. — Susan Forward

Alice wondered if her mother was aware that she wasn't the only one in town who'd come down with a bad case of Blueberry Fever. — Sarah Weeks

She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement - a rebellion. I didn't try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive. — Aspen Matis

[Lynda's mother] You're stupid and you don't know it, that's you're problem. You talk, talk, talk, all the time. No one wants to listen to an idiot.

[Young Lynda] Uh. OK. Thanks, Mom. — Lynda Barry

Today, Arizona's sons and daughters, mothers and fathers are proudly serving their country. — Jane D. Hull

We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Something wild was going on in that coffin ... .I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn't me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life? And then she realized- That was her. Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers. — Laura Kasischke

Being a woman in India is an altogether different experience. You can't always see the power women hold, but it is there, in the firm grasp of the matriarchs who still rule most families. It has not been easy for Sarla to navigate the female path: she has become a master traveler, but one with no pupil. She thought she might develop this relationship with one of her daughters-in-law, but the others, like Somer, didn't quite fill the role. And when they had babies, they relied on their own mothers, leaving her once again in the company of men. But now, Sarla muses as she glances at the clock, anticipating Krishnan's arrival, she will finally get her granddaughter. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were. — Alice Sebold

Did mothers always try to press unto their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed. Did I? — Joan Didion

Mothers! They promise you they'll never get married again, and next thing you know you're a bridesmaid. — Mindy Schanback

Her mother would tell her she was beautiful and that everything was all right. — Sarah Addison Allen

But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life. — Claire Messud

Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. — Julian Barnes

When war ends, women are the first to pick up the pieces. Where there is no market place, they go door to door. When homes are destroyed, mothers and daughters haul stones to rebuild or plow fields together. — Zainab Salbi

I wonder how, among the Fremont, mothers and daughters shared their world. Did they walk side by side along the lake edge? What stories did they tell while weaving strips of bulrush into baskets? How did daughters bury their mothers and exercise their grief? What were the secret rituals of women? I feel certain they must have been tied to birds. — Terry Tempest Williams

Sweetheart the doctor gave you the okay, and your friends will be there. It's okay to live your life. You can't be afraid at every turn. — Evelyn Smith

I think about following her, but I want to give Zoe a minute alone with her mother. I want them to have the shift and redistribution of their relationship that I never got to have with my own mom, that acrobatic feat of love where everything is turned upside down and yet they are both still able to keep their balance. — Jodi Picoult

I hope someday she meets just the right man and has babies - a whole passel of babies, more than I could have - so she understands how it kills me now that she won't let me hug her when she's in obvious distress. (The Life You've Imagined) — Kristina Riggle

I wanted to soothe and comfort her, the way she had comforted her daughters. — A.B. Shepherd

Raising a daughter is an extremely political act in this culture. Mothers have been placed in a no-win situation with their daught ers: if they teach their daughters simply how to get along in a world that has been shaped by men and male desires, then they betray their daughters' potential But, if they do not, they leave their daughters adrift in a hostile world without survival strategies. — Elizabeth Debold