Estranged Mother Quotes & Sayings

Would it have killed her to play along? To have told Pauline, Oh my! You're kidding! What a scandal! If gossip gave Pauline pleasure why deny her? Surely there was little enough pleasure for Pauline outside of work. A mother she'd nursed through cancer, a brother she was estranged from because of a terrible wife, a small apartment and a cheap landlord and an unending series of contacts with people - a grocer, a butcher, a waitress, a salesclerk, a bus driver - who did not meet her expectations. — Alice McDermott

There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne's death - George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother's hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten - the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's — William Makepeace Thackeray

I was an idiot," were my mother's last words. I'll never know what she meant because I wasn't there when she died. I am left with unanswered questions while I grieve for a woman I had barely spoken to during the last six months of her life. In fact, by the time I found out she had six months to live we'd been estranged for almost a year. — Amy Passantino

For me, the most powerful way to write about something is through the absence of it. Rather than writing about what it was to become a new mother, I wrote, for example, a father facing death and addressing his estranged son about the regrets of his relationship. — Nicole Krauss

I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another. — Quentin Tarantino