Mother Generations Quotes & Sayings

She's more even -[daughter China] - I think it jumps generations. You get a screwball in one, and then the next one is straight, then you get a screwball. My grandmother was goofy, my mother was straight. — Grace Slick

The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree ...
... The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread. — Kate Atkinson

Original sin itself comes straight from the Old Testament myth of Adam and Eve. Their sin - eating the fruit of a forbidden tree - seems mild enough to merit a mere reprimand. But the symbolic nature of the fruit (knowledge of good and evil, which in practice turned out to be knowledge that they were naked) was enough to turn their scrumping escapade into the mother and father of all sins. They and all their descendants were banished forever from the Garden of Eden, deprived of the gift of eternal life, and condemned to generations of painful labour, in the field and in childbirth respectively. — Richard Dawkins

The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, and so are you. — Elie Wiesel

even if you count back only four or five generations, you have an enormous number of living biological relatives descended from those ancestors. This is why it's not very unusual if you are descended from George Washington or another founding father or mother. — James Peoples

Leonardo's twenty-six-year-old father, Ser Piero, was (as his honorary title implied) a notary: someone who wrote wills, contracts, and other commercial and legal correspondence. The family had produced notaries for at least five generations, but with Leonardo the chain was to snap. He was, as his grandfather's tax return stated a few years later, "non legittimo" - born out of wedlock - and as such he (along with criminals and priests) was barred from membership in the Guild of Judges and Notaries. Leonardo's mother was a sixteen-year-old girl named Caterina, and an apparent difference in their social status meant she and Piero, a bright and ambitious young man, did not marry. Almost — Ross King

What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future. — Leonor Varela

What drove me now was a force beyond elementals, beyond time.
It was the force of a thousand years of history, the collected voices of generations of ondines, the desires of those who'd lived and died.
It was the dreams of my mother, the regrets of my grandmother, the forgotten promise of every Irisavie back to the first. — Emma Raveling

The boat was vacuum-packed with Albanians, four generations to a family: great-grandmother, air-dried like a chilli pepper, deep red skin and a hot temper; grandmother, all sun-dried tomato, tough, chewy, skin split with the heat; getting the kids to rub olive oil into her arms; mother, moist as a purple fig, open everywhere - blouse, skirt, mouth, eyes, a wide-open woman, lips licking the salt spray flying from the open boat. Then there were the kids, aged four and six, a couple of squirs, zesty as lemons. — Jeanette Winterson

I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth ... . That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?"
"Not in the first generation," he said, "but you might succeed with the second, and later generations. — Plato

The taboo for straight actors playing gay is gone ... My mother was squirming a bit in the theater because she comes from a different generation. — Dean Cain

Let the girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining, torturing, perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

new day, it all came back to the fact that he did not have a relationship with God. He'd already be up, and she trembled with the thought of seeing him again. How crazy was that? As if she could just walk blissfully to an altar and say, 'I do.' He had come all that way. Said he would've followed her to the ends of the earth. Still, just as her mother before her, she couldn't. Not with a non-believer. How true that the generations repeated. Her dear sister had paid a high price for disobedience. Mary Rachel had suffered for her bad choice...though God redeemed her in the end. — Caryl McAdoo

I've an enormous respect for my mother who at the age of 39 raised three children, and I grew up with my grandmother in the household. And so it was a really strong household of women - my poor brother! It was great growing up with so many generations of women. — Cate Blanchett

The wood wide web has been mapped, traced, monitored, and coaxed to reveal the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network. We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured tress pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system. Ours is not the only lab making these discoveries-there is a burst of careful scientific research occurring worldwide that is uncovering all manner of ways that trees communicate with each other above and below ground. — Peter Wohlleben

Thus we do not yet have experience with the
adult language abilities of monkeys and apes. One of the most intriguing questions is whether a verbally accomplished chimpanzee mother will be able to communicate language to her offspring. It seems very likely that this should be possible and that a community of chimps initially competent in gestural
language could pass down the language to subsequent generations. — Carl Sagan

The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one-thousand generations back of them ... Millions of women dead and gone are speaking through us today — Matilda Joslyn Gage

The purchaser therefore calculated not upon the value of the labour of his slave only, but, if a female, he regarded her as "the fruitful mother of an hundred more:" and many of these unfortunate people have there been in this state, whose descendants even in the compass of two or three generations have gone near to realize the calculation. - The great increase of slavery in the southern, in proportion to the northern states in the union, is therefore not attributable, solely, to the effect of sentiment, but to natural causes; as well as those considerations of profit, which — St. George Tucker

Born Virginia Marshall but nicknamed Gig, my mother was a home economics teacher who had come all the way across the whole state of Virginia, from her home on the Eastern Shore to our little Appalachian coal town to marry my daddy, Ernest Smith, whose family had lived in these mountains for generations. — Lee Smith

Women hand sight down through the generations. Mother to daughter. — Jewell Parker Rhodes

Within each of us, there lies the innate ability to survive, triumph, and overcome, rewriting the scripts of our own lives, having some power over our fate and the fate of generations to come. Nothing has to be 'just because that's the way it's always been.' -The Boots My Mother Gave Me — Brooklyn James

Every new mother wonders, 'what will I pass on to my child'? Hunger is one inheritance no mother wants to give her child, yet millions of poor women have for generations. Help the World Food Programme break this cycle. No child should inherit hunger. — Rachel Weisz

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework
an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. — Betty Friedan

A woman with a mother heart has a testimony of the restored gospel, and she teaches the principles of the gospel without equivocation. She is keeping sacred covenants made in holy temples. Her talents and skills are shared unselfishly. She gains as much education as her circumstances will allow, improving her mind and spirit with the desire to teach what she learns to the generations who follow her. — Julie B. Beck

Mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations as all other earthly causes combined. — John Stevens Cabot Abbott

We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. — Peter Wohlleben

It is essential to collectively struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth. In that is our strength, and the security, not in the predator, but in the security of our Mother, for our future generations. In that we can insure our security as the Mothers of our Nations. — Winona LaDuke

Speaking as a mother of unborn generations, I'm against it. — Terry Pratchett

The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of reaching towards it step by step; create the future, in short, of which the living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. — Giuseppe Mazzini

Mom! Look. This one is my favorite," Devin said, pulling out a faded pink dress with a red plaid sash. The crinoline petticoat underneath was so old and stiff it made snapping sounds, like beads or fire embers. She dropped the dress over her head, over her clothes. It brushed the floor. "When I'm old enough for it to fit me, I'm going to wear it with purple shoes," she said.
"A bold choice," Kate said as Devin dove back into the trunk. The attic in Kate's mother's house had always fascinated Devin with its promise of hidden treasures. When Kate's mother had been alive, she had let Devin eat Baby Ruth candy bars and drink grape soda and play in this old trunk full of dresses that generations of Morris women had worn to try entice rich men to marry them. Most of the clothes had belonged to Kate's grandmother Marilee, a renowned beauty who, like all the rest, had fallen in love with a poor man instead. — Sarah Addison Allen

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations. — Carl Jung

Most immigrants agree that at some point, we become permanent foreigners, belonging neither here nor there. Many tomes have been written trying to describe this feeling of floating between worlds but never fully landing. Artists, using every known medium from words to film to Popsicle sticks, have attempted to encapsulate the struggle of trying to hang on to the solid ground of our mother culture and realizing that we are merely in a pond balancing on a lily pad with a big kid about to belly-flop right in. If and when we fall into this pond, will we be singularly American or will we hyphenate? Can we hold on to anything or does our past just end up at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be discovered by future generations? — Firoozeh Dumas

I don't agree with the whole 'my mother's my friend' approach, because you're their mum and there has to be a difference between the generations. — Jane Asher

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today
with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be. [January 3, 2008] — Barack Obama

In a lot of ways I was a generation ahead of my generation; I had a working mother wheneveryone else's mother was staying at home. — Patricia C. Wrede

My grandfather was from outside of Moscow, and my grandmother, although some of her family were French, was from Odessa. They met as immigrants in New York in the early '20s. My mother's family came over from Ireland generations ago. — Alexis Denisof

White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott's suggestion of a trained nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten thousand denied him by the surgeon. The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgement. All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who live sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations. Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures. — Jack London

When your heart speaks to you about what you need to do to sustain life on this planet, listen to it, make a difference, and be an inspiration for generations to come. Be inspired by people like Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Christopher Reeve, Albert Schweitzer, Helen Keller, and many others. — Bernie Siegel

The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until not very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation which all after generations have in truth been struggling either to protect or to tear down — G.K. Chesterton

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

When we walk upon Mother Earth,
we always plant our feet carefully
because we know the faces of our future generations
are looking up at us from beneath the ground.
we never forget them. — Oren Lyons

Because parents are transients in the maternity care system, there is little cumulative birth experience over successive generations of mothers. Women giving birth don't make the same mistakes as their mothers or grandmothers-they make new ones. — Elizabeth Noble

We, the Hawaiian people, who are born from the union of Papahanaumoku and Wakea, earth mother and sky father, and who have lived in these islands for over 100 generations, will always have the moral right to the lands of Hawai'i now and forever, no matter what any court says. — Lilikala K. Kame'eleihiwa

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceasless crying: he was alreday forgiving me my shortcomings as a father; he was a distillation of a dozen generations, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the this slip of his ribs. I'd hold him to the window and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky. — Anthony Doerr

On the one hand, I was happy to have a proper diagnosis. Aside from a trust fund and a royal title, that was really the only thing I'd ever wanted in life. On the other hand, I was offended to learn that my brain was defective. Or, I suppose I should say, "differently abled."
One thing I was not was surprised. Four generations of manic depression on my mother's side of the family. Three of autism on my father's side. Drug addict uncles, a pyromaniac cousin, a couple of schizophrenics and suicides, several flesh-and-blood geniuses, and a pecan farmer. You just cannot mix those raw ingredients together and then stick them inside my mother for nine months and expect something normal to come out. It's a wonder I wasn't born with a set of horns. — Augusten Burroughs

The name Yunupingu means 'rock - rock that stands against time'. The name Yunupingu belonged to my grandad, like he was a hero in his time. It was passed down through the generations to my Father. It's a name that makes us understand who we are, where we're coming from and what our connections are to mother earth and the universe. — Mandawuy Yunupingu

Aidan pulled away and stared intently at her. His blue eyes blazed with intensity. "Listen to me. You have every right to be scared, but I want you to believe me when I say that Noah is going to be fine. He's blessed with some strong as hell genes." Placing his hand on her belly, he smiled. "He's part Fitzgerald, and for generations, the men of my family have been known for being tough, scrappy fighters with a will of iron to survive."
"Really?" she questioned with a hiccup.
Aidan nodded. "But even more than the fighting Irish Fitzgerald blood pumping through him, he's inherited the most amazing DNA from his mother. She's the strongest person I've ever known. — Katie Ashley

As I ate she began the first of what we later called "my lessons in living." She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations. — Maya Angelou

Sarah will talk to me about someone and I don't know who she's talking about, but if she talks to my mother, the two of them will know exactly - and across several generations, too. — Prince Andrew

The corridor was still empty of all the feet in sad generations seeking water. yet the eyes unseeing clenched like teeth not disbelieving doubting even the absence of pain shin ankle knee the long invisible flowing of the stair-railing where a misstep in the darkness filled with sleeping Mother Father Caddy Jason Maury door I am not afraid only Mother Father Caddy Jason Maury geting so far ahead sleeping I will sleep fast when I door Door door It was empty too, the pipes, the porcelain, the stained quiet walls, the throne of contemplation. — William Faulkner

Listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations. When — Maya Angelou