Italian Mother Quotes & Sayings

My mother and father were supportive. But in an Italian family, you kind of work with your hands, or you are an engineer or a doctor. But an actor was something they couldn't get hold of. They were afraid I wouldn't be able to make a living, and for many years, they were right. — Michael Rispoli

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian. — Michelle Hunziker

I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry. — Allegra Huston

My mother is not a CIA agent, but she's an Italian mother, and she'd do anything for her son. — Adriano Giannini

My Italian granny and my mother made great spaghetti, but it wasn't a kind of southern Italian, Godfather-esque kind of thing - it was a wonderful, big mixing pot of all kinds of people - when you came home from school and your mum wasn't in, there were lots of people you could go to. — Peter Capaldi

Will gritted his teeth as Will Junior and Nellie continued their debate. He loved his son, but he found him
and many members of hisgeneration
ruthless in their pursuit of money and standing and harsh toward the less fortunate. He had reminded him on many occasions that both the McClanes and their mother's family
the Van der leydens
had at one time been immigrants. As had members of all the city's wealthy families. But Will's lectures made no difference to his son. He was an American. And those getting off the boat at Castle Garden were not. Italian, Irish, Chinese, Polish
nationality made no difference. They were lazy, stupid, and dirty. Their numbers spelled ruin for the country. p. 264 — Jennifer Donnelly

I love my heritage! I have my mother, who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African. — Alicia Keys

My mother and father told me I was god. I was a good Italian boy who hung out with the same four guys. I was a little god. — Chazz Palminteri

Most people didn't know that his mother was black. She died when he was three, and his Italian father raised him. He didn't hold that up as some kind of "get in free" card. The reality was, his entire life he walked a tightrope between his two realities. More often than not he took the road of least resistance - his white privilege. — Olivia Hill

I love cooking. My Italian mother is a genius cook, and I picked that up from her. I make my own sauce, which takes four hours, from a recipe that's been refined over many years. I won't tell anybody what it is. — Josh Fox

The Celtic, Galatian, or Gallic nation received from the common mother endowments different from those of its Italian, Germanic, and Hellenic sisters. — Theodor Mommsen

Maybe it's just not the right time for us to be married. I don't want to be a bounty hunter for the rest of my life, but I certainly don't want to be a housewife right now. And I really don't want to be married to someone who gives me ultimatums.
And maybe Joe needs to examine what he wants from a wife. He was raised in a traditional Italian household with a stay-at-home mother and domineering father. If he wants a wife who will fit into that mold, I'm not for him. I might be a stay-at-home mother someday, but I'll always be trying to fly off the garage roof. That's just who I am. — Janet Evanovich

I always knew that food and wine were vital, with my mother being Italian and a good cook. — Robert Mondavi

I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do. — Sebastian Arcelus

Even his highly emotional Italian mother didn't believe that true love could blossom overnight. Like his brothers and sisters-in-law, she wanted nothing more for him than to marry and start a family, but if he showed up at her doorstep and said that he'd met someone two days ago and knew she was the one for him, his mother would smack him with a broom, curse in Italian, and drag him to church, sure that he had some serious sins that needed confessing. — Nicholas Sparks

My goodness carina mia, you are so thin. You do not eat enough. Mangia, mangia, mangia! [Alicia's Italian mother's view of her daughter.] — Celia Conrad

I have family in Italy that my mother keeps in contact with, but I don't because I don't speak Italian. — Pauly D

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

You said,' Camille protested, 'that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It's true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation. — Hilary Mantel

My mother is Italian and my dad's Irish. In my family, we're expressive. Nobody holds back. — Kate Walsh

Good food and a warm kitchen are what makes a house a home. I always tried to make my home like my mother's, because Mom was magnificent at stretching a buck when it came to decorating and food. Like a true Italian, she valued beautification in every area of her life, and I try to do the same. — Rachael Ray

I don't know anyone who curses the way they do on the Sopranos. Not in an Italian household. I never said the word hell in front of my mother. — Danny Aiello

I also want to go to an Italian island and do cuisine properly with some famous Italian chef and, like, his mother. — Elizabeth Olsen

My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce. — Mitch Albom

Well, I'm Italian, but my family isn't stereotypical. I mean, I only have one sister and we don't yell or throw pasta at each other. My mother doesn't even have a secret spaghetti sauce recipe. — Jennifer Esposito

Danny was a matador. Other cast members included a chubby Italian chef, a mime, and, for some reason, a mummy. I found that offensive on behalf of living Egyptian people, but I also knew that Parker McHune's mother couldn't sew, so wrapping her son in Ace bandages was the best she could do. — Molly Harper

If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant? — Martin Scorsese

Mother after the Greek kids' parties because they served Italian rum cake. Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate about everything. No one even ate it. — Tina Fey

I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they're meant to. My husband is a really fantastic cook. His mother is Italian and if you walk into our house, we assume you're starving. — Elizabeth Gilbert

My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French. — Lorraine Bracco

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase. — Stephanie Coontz

When I tell people I'm an Italian Jew, they're very amused by it. But obviously by blood I'm Jewish, because my mother is. — Antonio Sabato Jr.

I had a very Italian house - the "plastic furniture you couldn't sit on" house. Did anybody have the museum house? For a kid it's traumatic. Towels you can never touch. China no one's ever gonna use. Everything is for a special occasion that never happens. My mother was waiting for the Pope to show up for dinner. Or Sinatra. Or Chachi. — Ray Romano

My tone must have seemed hostile, even though I wasn't angry or offended; there was just a touch of sarcasm. He tried to respond but he did so in an awkward, muddled way, half in dialect, half in Italian. He said he was sure that his mother was wandering around Naples as usual. — Elena Ferrante

The Big Snooze is like an overprotective Italian mother who not only doesn't want you to ever go outside, but who wants you to live with her forever. Her intentions are good, but fully fear-based. As long as you stay inside the familiar, risk-free zone of your present reality, the Big Snooze is content, but should you try and sneak past her to attend the rockin' party outside, your overprotective, controlling mother is going to claw, scratch, scream, bite, hurl her body in front of your rapidly approaching new life - basically she's going to do whatever she can to stop you. And it ain't gonna be pretty. — Jen Sincero

My parents were both from extremely different backgrounds. My father's Italian, my mother was of Swedish descent. They're both first-generation Americans. — Susan Lucci

My mother is French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her. I've been raised, and she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian. — George Allen

For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge business to come and rescue you. — Lemony Snicket

He's too tired to squirm clear of her, which is good 'cause pinching and kissing and hugging will calm an Italian mother-person better than anything. — D. James Smith

Any woman who marries an Italian must accept the undeniable fact that she has also married his mother. — Diane Cilento

Caleb came to his mother's side and helped her to her feet. "Besides, if you rest, then I am free to make love to Jacqueline."
"Caleb!" Jacqueline had been worried she would say the wrong thing. Instead, Caleb had put his foot in it.
But obviously all the cliches she'd ever heard about Italian sons were true. He really could do no wrong, for Mrs. D'Angelo shook her finger at him
but she said indulgently, "You are incorrigible."
"Ma, I'm just trying to get going on those grandchildren you want. — Christina Dodd

Breakfast was ready. He could hear his father asking for coffee. Why did his father have to yell all the time? Couldn't he talk in a low voice? Everybody in the neighborhood knew everything that went on in their house on account of his father constantly shouting. The Moreys next door - you never heard a peep out of them, never; quiet American people. But his father wasn't satisfied with being an Italian, he had to be a noisy Italian.
'Arturo,' his mother called. 'Breakfast.'
As if he didn't know breakfast was ready! As if everybody in Colorado didn't know by this time that the Bandini family was having breakfast! — John Fante

People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European, born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe, met my dad, fell in love, and then moved back to Rome, where I was raised, between Rome and Hamburg. — Giancarlo Esposito

I'm a first generation American. My mother is Italian and Russian and a lot of other things, and my father is Uruguayan. In fact, my mother's been married twice, and both men were Uruguayan. So I grew up in a very European/Latin American-influenced home. — Sebastian Arcelus

The Italian comes to his table with the same open heart with which a child falls into his mother's arms, with the same easy feeling of being in the right place. — Marcella Hazan

On Final Twist, five college friends take a sixth to an expensive Italian restaurant, supposedly to introduce him to a hot girl, actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers. — George Saunders

Grass Fires"
No ease for the boy at his keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women's white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.
In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother's coffin
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL
The corpse
was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil
Father's death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
his last words to Mother were:
"I feel awful."
He smiled his oval Lowell smile ...
It has taken me the time since you died
to discover you are as human as I am ...
If I am. — Robert Lowell

I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother. — Jack Kerouac