Mother S Death Quotes & Sayings

If what Granma Mary Rommely said is true, then it must be that no one ever dies, really. Papa is gone, but he's still here in many ways. He's here in Neeley who looks just like him and in Mama who knew him so long. He's here in his mother who began him and who is still living. Maybe I will have a boy some day who looks like Papa and has all of Papa's good without the drinking. And that boy will have a boy. And that boy will have a boy. It might be there is no real death. — Betty Smith

[In China at that time:] The penalty for adultery is death by strangulation. Mai-da's mother has added the following note to this section; 'Adultery is a feminine vice. Copulation on the man's part is not his wife's concern, unless he sires a child. Then she must accept the child as one of his homestead. — Nora Waln

My mother used to say that rain here pours like a blessing, like a thick veil that parts to reveal the bride's face. But nearly every day, when this rain parted, it revealed a long line of soldiers, like you, like death, marching toward us, and we would scatter with a practiced silence and hide. — Mia Kirshner

I can't let my mother's death have been in vain. Democracy is the best revenge, and we will have it. — Bilawal Bhutto Zardari

All those calm, adult discussions. When all she really wanted to do was scream for her momma, her sweet momma, the one person in the world who loved her better than anyone ever would or ever could. — Fannie Flagg

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. — C.S. Lewis

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

You would think a person could only die once. You would think you would only find you sister's lifeless body once. You would think you would only have to watch your mother's reaction once after finding out her only daughter is dead.
Once is so far from accurate.
It happens repeatedly.
Every single time I close my eyes I see Les's eyes. Every time my mother looks at me, she's watching me tell her that her daughter is dead for the second time. For the third time. For the thousandth time. Every time I take a breath or blink or speak, I experience her death all over again. I don't sit here and wonder if the fact that she's dead will ever sink in. I sit here and wonder when I'll stop having to watch her die. — Colleen Hoover

But let me ask you this: when Canaan cloaked you with his wings and you disappeared from the Terrestrial realm, did you just...stop existing?"
"Of course not," I say, surprised by the question.
"It's the same thing, Elle. Ali and your mother have been cloaked by death. You can't see them, but they're not gone. Not really. Our spirits will outlive our physical bodies, so it's our spirits we have to take care of."

- page 285 — Shannon Dittemore

To My Mother First published : 1849 A heartful sonnet written to Poe's mother-in-law and aunt Maria Clemm, "To My Mother" says that the mother of the woman he loved is more important than his own mother. It was first published on July 7, 1849 in Flag of Our Union. It has alternately been published as "Sonnet to My Mother." Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of "Mother," Therefore by that dear name I long have called you - You who are more than mother unto me, And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you In setting my Virginia's spirit free. My mother - my own mother, who died early, Was but the mother of myself; but you Are mother to the one I loved so dearly, And thus are dearer than the mother I knew By that infinity with which my wife Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life. — Edgar Allan Poe

Now he wondered what use it would be. For Kaspar's death would not bring back his father, Elk's Call at Dawn, or his mother, Whisper of the Night Wind. His brother, Hand of the Sun, and his little sister Miliana would remain dead. The only time he would hear the voice of his grandfather, Laughter in His Eyes, would be in his memory. Nothing would change. No farmer outside Krondor would suddenly stand up in wonder and say, "A wrong has been righted." No boot-maker in Roldem would look up from his bench and say, "A people has been avenged. — Raymond E. Feist

Well, I'm sorry you couldn't make it either. I'm sorry I had to sit there in that church--which, by the way, had a broken air conditioner--sweating, watching all those people march down the aisle to look in my mother's casket and whisper to themselves all this mess about how much she looked like herself, even though she didn't. I'm sorry you weren't there to hear the lame choir drag out, song after song. I'm sorry you weren't there to see my dad try his best to be upbeat, cracking bad jokes in his speech, choking on his words. I'm sorry you weren't there to watch me totally lose it and explode into tears. I'm sorry you weren't there for me, but it doesn't matter, because even if you were, you wouldn't be able to feel what I feel. Nobody can. Even the preacher said so. — Jason Reynolds

Everything had felt so precarious since her mother's death, like she was walking on a bridge made of paper. — Sarah Addison Allen

I didn't know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn't know then how deeply my mother's song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn't know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn't know we were our mother's daughters after all. — Lidia Yuknavitch

You know," my father said sprinkling nutmeg on his brandy Alexander, "if you sniff too much nutmeg, you could die."
"You can die from anything, really," my mother said "You can die from eating too many apricots."
"How many apricots?" I said, afraid that the World's Most Pathetic Death could happen to me. — Alison Espach

The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance. — Germaine Greer

A Mother's Advice

Manners matter, regardless of your position in society. There is no excuse in this world to practice bad manners, especially at the table. I found that out in high school. I was invited to my boyfriend's house for dinner. His parents were somewhat formal, and I knew the dinner would be "fancy," at least in my mind. My family wasn't upper class (or even middle class), and my mother never had what would be called "social graces."
Before I left, my mother gave me a piece of advice: hold your head high, be quiet, and take the lead from his mother. Even though I was scared to death, I did what my mother advised and got through the experience with flying colors.
To this day, my mother's advice has gotten me through many difficult situations, especially ones that are totally new to me! With my mother's simple advice, I know I could dine with the Queen of England, just by following her lead. Thanks, Mother!

-Deborah Ford — Deborah Ford

I know a flower that grows in the valley, none knows it but I. It has purple leaves, and a star in its heart, and its juice is as white as milk. Should'st thou touch with this flower the hard lips of the Queen, she would follow thee all over the world. Out of the bed of the King she would rise, and over the whole world she would follow thee. And it has a price, pretty boy, it has a price. What d'ye lack? What d'ye lack? I can pound a toad in a mortar, and make broth of it, and stir the broth with a dead man's hand. Sprinkle it on thine enemy while he sleeps, and he will turn into a black viper, and his own mother will slay him. With a wheel I can draw the Moon from heaven, and in a crystal I can show thee Death. What d'ye lack? What d'ye lack? Tell me thy desire, and I will give it thee, and thou shalt pay me a price, pretty boy, thou shalt pay me a price. — Oscar Wilde

Final Disposition

Others divided closets full of mother's things.
From the earth, I took her poppies.
I wanted those fandango folds
of red and black chiffon she doted on,
loving the wild and Moorish music of them,
coating her tongue with the thin skin
of their crimson petals.

Snapping her fingers, flamenco dancer,
she'd mock the clack of castanets
in answer to their gypsy cadence.
She would crouch toward the flounce of flowers,
twirl, stamp her foot, then kick it out
as if to lift the ruffles, scarlet
along the hemline of her yard.

And so, I dug up, soil and all,
the thistle-toothed and gray-green clumps
of leaves, the testicle seedpods and hairy stems
both out of season, to transplant them in my less-exotic garden. There, they bloom
her blood's abandon, year after year,
roots holding, their poppy heads nodding
a carefree, opium-ecstatic, possibly forever sleep. — Jane Glazer

Begin. Keep on beginning. Nibble on everything.
Take a hike. Teach yourself to whistle. Lie.
The older you get the more they'll want your stories.
Make them up. Talk to stones. Short-out electric
fences. Swim with the sea turtle into the moon. Learn
how to die. Eat moonshine pie. Drink wild geranium
tea. Run naked in the rain. Everything that happens
will happen and none of us will be safe from it.
Pull up anchors. Sit close to the god of night.
Lie still in a stream and breathe water. Climb to the
top of the highest tree until you come to the branch
where the blue heron sleeps. Eat poems for breakfast.
Wear them on your forehead. Lick the mountain's
bare shoulder. Measure the color of days
around your mother's death. Put your hands over
your face and listen to what they tell you. — Ellen Kort

I have said three words too many, too bad, I take them back, I add them. I have several times deserved death, especially in Greece, where I sawed up the palette of an old man who stalked my lady friends right up to my camp bed. I messed up the hairdo of the greatest criminal in Chaldea. For all that I did not have to make use of my daughter native to the lower part of her father's vision, all the plains as far as the eye can see which eat hampers full of mother of pearl. — Paul Eluard

When Angra conquered my kingdom sixteen years ago, he did so by breaking our Royal Conduit. And when a conduit is broken in defense of a kingdom, the ruler of that kingdom becomes the conduit themselves. Their body, their life force - it all merges with the magic. No one knows this, save for me, Angra, and the woman whose death turned me into Winter's conduit: my mother. — Sara Raasch

We walk on the ground and give sparse recognition to the mud that will be the eternal homes for the bodies that we praise so much. Ground might not worth much but it holds billions of history and some of humanity's greatest treasures, One day it will become our permanent home. Maybe we should begin a mud religion and give reverence to the dirt, in the end, it is the dirt, ground and Mother Earth that wins and reigns supreme throughout the centuries. — Crystal Evans

I could not tell you the date of my mother's death. I could not tell you the date of my dad's death. These are not dates that I find significant. — O.J. Simpson

Yes, my mother's death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel - do you know what I mean - the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known. — Katherine Mansfield

I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead. — Joseph O'Neill

I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins. — Edith Wharton

I loved my mother too,' I said. 'I still do. That's the thing - it never goes away, even if the person does. — Anna Carey

Angelina said, "Mom. I don't want you to die. That's the whole thing. You took from me the ability to care for you in your old age, and I wanted to be with you when you died, when you die. Mom. I wanted that. — Elizabeth Strout

There are no humans left. I should not be alone. I can't help but wonder that. There were so many of us living. But time started growing young four years ago. It isn't four years anymore. It's a number I wouldn't even be able to say. It feels like four years. It's trapped in my tender memory as four years. It's been an age. Multiple ages. It's been lifetimes; every single lifetime that used to exist. I remember my mother screaming. I recall the doctors naming me as nurses wiped away her blood and covered her face with white. The end of the play. It's been so long. Why am I alone? — F.K. Preston

I very much faced my mother's death with hard, arduous and time-consuming labor. The more I would do, the less I would feel. — Rufus Wainwright

4. The whole Icarus-flying-too-near-the-sun-and-plummeting-out-of-the-sky thing? That's real. Same with the Sirens who lure you to death with their irresistible song, and the odalisque so beautiful anyone who looks at her dies. And remember: as badass as Grendel was, Beowulf hadn't seen anything until he went up against Grendel's mother. I know, I know - I thought they were just myths too. But the fact is, sometimes, if you don't want to meet a tragic end, your only option is to avert your gaze, tie yourself to the mast with cotton in your ears, or ascend a little less close to the Vault of Heaven. — Todd Hanson

My mother's family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire. — Pat Conroy

Sometimes during the night, your father awakened. He rose from his bed, staggered across the room, and found the strength to raise the window sash. He called your mother's name with what little voice he had, and he called yours, too, and your brother, Joe. And he called for Mickey. At that moment, it seemed, his heart was spilling out, all the guilt and regret. Perhaps he felt the light of death approaching. Perhaps he only knew you were all out there somewhere, in the streets beneath his window. He bent over the ledge. The night was chilly. The wind and damp, in his state, were too much. He was dead before dawn. — Mitch Albom

It's not the plant-based foods that will make you ill, it's the meat and the liquid meat (i.e.: dairy) that can lead to sickness and death. Consider this: If your food had a face or a mother (or comes from something that did), then it also has varying amounts of artery-clogging, plaque-plugging, and cholesterol-hiking animal protein, animal cholesterol, and animal fat. These substances are the building blocks of the chronic diseases that plague Western society. — Rip Esselstyn

It was like a dam of musical critique had broken. Imasu turned on him with eyes that flashed instead of shining. It is worse than you can possibly imagine! When you play, all of my mother's flowers lose the will to live and expire on the instant. The quinoa has no flavour now. The llamas are migrating because of your music, and llamas are not a migratory animal. The children now believe there is a sickly monster, half horse and half large mournful chicken, that lives in tha lake and calls out to the world to grant it the sweet release of death. — Cassandra Clare

I say no wealth is worth my life! Not all they claim
was stored in the depths of Troy, that city built on riches,
in the old days of peace before the sons of Achaea came-
not all the gold held fast in the Archer's rocky vaults,
in Phoebus Apollo's house on Pytho's sheer cliffs!
Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man's life breath cannot come back again-
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.
Mother tells me,
the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
that two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies ...
true, but the life that's left me will be long,
the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. — Homer

She wanted to die. She wanted to die. Because then it would be over. All the loss, all the grief, all the pain, the emptiness - over. And she had said nothing then. Nothing. Nor had she crawled into her room and swallowed her mother's pills, or crawled into her bath and opened up her own wrists. As if death were somehow personal. As if death were somehow an enemy that could be faced and stared down, she would not give it the satisfaction of seeing how badly it had hurt her. Again. — Michelle Sagara West

My mother's death
changed the alchemy of food.
Holidays run together now
like ungrooved rivers. I forget
what they are for. I buy bakery goods.
They look dead
under the blue lights.
I don't do anything the way she taught me
but I get fat.
I don't look like her and I don't sound
like her, but I stand like her. — Florence Weinberger

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him — Jane Goldman

Sonnet III: Black Coffin opened wide for all to See

Black Coffin opened wide for all to See,
The lifeless form of one I loved so dear.
O, listen! mournful knells that soon shall be
All night long tolling for the folk to hear.
The lanterns overlight the old churchyard
To watch the coffin lowered into the ground;
Soon Frost shall grasp the turf already hard,
Decay ye have to face without a sound.
But years have pass'd herein do I relate
My dear sweet mother's form within my mind.
Still happiness fills all my heart and state,
As I see my small family so kind.
Love cannot be withheld by death or grave,
It stays alive within the heart so brave. — Timothy Salter

I feel a thread tugging me again, but this time I know that it isn't some sinister force dragging me toward death.
This time I know it's my mother's hand, drawing me into her arms.
And I go gladly into her embrace. — Veronica Roth

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

All my work will explode inside my body, each fragment of my anatomy will acquire a life of its own, outside mine, Humberto won't exist, only these monsters, the despot who imprisoned me at La Rinconada to force me to invent him, Ines's honey complexion, Brigida's death, Iris Mateluna's hysterical pregnancy, the saintly girl who was never beatified, Humberto Penaloza's father pointing out Don Jeronimo dressed up to go to the Jockey Club, and your benign, kind hand, Mother Benita, that does not and will not let go of mine, and your attention fixed on these words of a mute, and your rosaries, the Casa's La Rinconada as it once was, as it is now, as it was afterwards, the escape, the crime, all of it alive in my brain, Peta Ponce's prism refracting and confusing everything and creating simultaneous and contradictory planes, everything without ever reaching paper, because I always hear voices and laughter enveloping and tying me up. — Jose Donoso

I missed my mother's father. Is that even possible? Maybe I had fallen asleep for a while. Maybe I was like her, just waking up and looking for him to be there. I wondered how it would have changed things for all of us if he had stayed home the day he was supposed to die in his car. How his decision to go out for something small, something like coffee or orange juice which everyone could have done without, had changed things for all of us. — Ann Patchett

The social prestige of wine at table and at the club must be destroyed through lofty example and polite ridicule; forces which are not always available, and for whose successful operation much time will be required. But the outstanding fact remains, that the world has come to regard liquor in a new and clearer light. Our next generation of poets will contain but few Anacreons, for the thinking element of mankind has robbed the flowing bowl of its fancied virtues and fictitious beauties. The grape, so long permitted to masquerade as the inspirer of wit and art, is now revealed as the mother of ruin and death. The wolf at last stands divested of its sheep's clothing. — H.P. Lovecraft

So may'st thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop Into thy mother's lap, or be with ease Gathered, not harshly plucked, for death mature: This is old age; but then thou must outlive Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change To withered weak and grey. — John Milton

My mother's songs are really turning out to be masterpieces. I have inherited this incredible legacy and am so fortunate to bathe in her sensibilities. It is tinged with tragedy. I'd much rather she was here in person, but there is still a positive force to come out of her death and that is having the gift of music that she gave. — Rufus Wainwright

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses. — Meghan O'Rourke

Sam and Caine were left standing side by side, bruised and battered, to stare over Penny's sickening corpse, at the face of their mother. — Michael Grant

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.
How would that be? Just how would that be? — Stephen King

My mother married again after my father's death - another Royal Air Force officer, and a very different kind of man. We went to Australia when I was eight or nine. We lived there for a couple of years, and then came back and lived in North Wales for the whole of my teenage years. I learned how to write poems quite a lot. I just had a good time reading and reading and reading. So that's where I did most of my growing up. — Philip Pullman

I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex.
"Do you believe in God?" I asked my father.
"God has lots of potential," he said.
"When you pray," I asked him. "What do you pray about?"
"That's none of your business," he said.
We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across every border. — Sherman Alexie

You are linked to the ground mechanic's careless fingers in Nassau just as you are linked to the weak head of the little man in the family saloon who mistakes the red light for the green and meets you head-on, for the first and last time, as you are motoring quietly home from some private sin. There's nothing to do about it. You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs. Your stars have already let you come quite a long way since you left your mother's womb and whimpered at the cold air of the world. — Ian Fleming

Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period. — Will Self

Jim had spent most of his life alone. The solitary nature of his disability and the constant moving had made it difficult for him to make friends. With his mother's death,
his last connection to a person was severed. He existed in Broughton like a ghost, doing his odd jobs, too silent for anyone to notice. — Bonnie Dee

Before we leave the gravesite, Mary sings Mother's favorite gospel hymn ...
Mary's lovely voice rises and lingers in the air, and by the end of the song most of us are crying. I am too, though I still don't know what those stars are meant to represent. My mistake, I suppose, is in thinking they should mean something. — Christina Baker Kline

Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It's me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, it's me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she'd begun writing books, he'd heard about it through her mother whom he'd met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he'd been grieved for her. Then he didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death. — Marguerite Duras

I went into the living room and looked down at my mother's torn body and shook my head. It was surreal. I guess some people in that situation would have crumbled, some would have cried, but I'd emotionally disconnected from life a long time ago. For that, I had to thank the skeletal bitch on the floor, with her greedy rodent soul and her short-tempered ape-mate in the kitchen. If anything, her death was a belated answer to old prayers, with a bit of an unexpected mess. — Bobby Adair

Hitchcock's debut novel introduces 14-year-old Jessie Pearl, who endures more than her fair share of hardships, beginning with the death of her mother. Opening in 1922, the story follows the daily activities on the family's North Carolina tobacco farm. ...Hitchcock's story is gently and lovingly written, with elements drawn from her own family history. Its detailed honesty about the particular struggles of the period, especially for strong women (Maude, a no-nonsense midwife, is particularly memorable), is significant.
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY — Publishers Weekly

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. — Richard Russo

There was something about him that had always rubbed her the wrong way. Before her mother's death, she [Shiara] could remember her saying that he was a nice enough young man, but not the one for her daughter. — J.C. Morrows

you can pass a football,you can gas,but you yourself cannot just pass~cam after lilly's mother informs her that lilly has passed — Wendy Wunder

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother - even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son's death because his death was ugly and unfair. You're grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death. — Cheryl Strayed

Remember to think of your departed mother always as living, just away in another room of our Father's house. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

When did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn't matter anymore. And also: maybe it all began with my mother's death. And also: the pain doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't get any worse, as long as it isn't unbearable. And also: fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around him, ghosts. — Roberto Bolano

So many fear death - spending their precious waking hours discussing it - while failing to notice that deep sleep is no different. It's as if they don't hear Mother Nature telling them not to worry every day. — Anthony Marais

I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler's anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian 'correctively' raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself. — Stephen Fry

Father's Day was great, but all the family gatherings brought up my mother's death. Maybe it's me, because I am a wimp. We would get together, but there was someone missing! — Doug Davidson

Sunday morning sneaks up on us
like dawn, like resurrection, like the sun that rises a ribbon at a time. We expect a trumpet and a triumphant entry, but as always, God surprises us by showing up in ordinary things: in bread, in wine, in water, in words, in sickness, in healing, in death, in a manger of hay, in a mother's womb, in an empty tomb. p.258 — Rachel Held Evans

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

Did she say anything before she died?" he asked.
"Yes," the surgeon said. "She said, 'Forgive him'"
"Forgive him?" my father asked.
"I think she was referring to the drunk driver who killed her."
Wow.
My grandmother's last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love and tolerance.
She wanted us to forgive Gerald, the dumb-ass Spokane Indian alcoholic who ran her over and killed her.
I think My Dad wanted to go find Gerald and beat him to death.
I think my mother would have helped him.
I think I would have helped him, too.
But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.
Even dead, she was a better person than us. — Sherman Alexie

What you do to these men on California's Death Row, you do to God. — Mother Teresa

Her mother's quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline's despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live. — Pamela Erens

Nobody asks about Beethoven's mother's own life - a fairly miserable round of pregnancy, childbirth, and child death. Was Maria Magdalena Keverich van Beethoven put on earth only to produce her wunderkind? Might she have had gifts of her own that she never got to offer the world? — Katha Pollitt

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

Oleander will kill you quickly. Azaleas, ingested, take a few hours. Vomiting, paralysis, seizures, coma, death. Then there's savin, henbane, foxglove, jimsonweed ... all here in Pico Mundo."
"And we call her Mother Nature."
"There's nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either," Ozzie said. — Dean Koontz

I see women and children starving to death, homes destroyed and buried in rubble, the countryside a burnt landscape, its only fruit the rotting flesh of casualties. I see dead dead dead red and burgundy and maroon and the richest shade of your mother's favorite lipstick all smeared into the earth. — Tahereh Mafi

The Americans say that we are ungrateful-but I ask them for heaven's sake, what should we be grateful to them for-for murdering our fathers and mothers?-Or do they wish us to return thanks to them for chaining and handcuffing us, branding us, cramming fire down our throats, or for keeping us in slavery, and beating us nearly or quite to death to make us work in ignorance and miseries, to support them and their families. They certainly think we are a gang of fools. — David Walker

Neil thought about Renee's bruised knuckles, Dan's fierce spirit, and Allison holding her ground on the court a week after Seth's death. He thought about his mother standing unflinching in the face of his father's violent anger and her ruthlessly leaving bodies in their wake. He felt compelled to say, "Some of the strongest people I've known are women. — Nora Sakavic

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

Can you hear me, Father? Can you understand me?" The eyes did not change or move. "I did it,"
Cal cried. "I'm responsible for Aron's death and for your sickness. I took him to Kate's. I showed him
his mother. That's why he went away. I don't want to do bad things - but I do them. — John Steinbeck

4For God said : Do your duty fob your father and mother and : Anyone who curses father or mother must be put to death." 5But you say, 'If anyone says to his father or mother: Anything I have that I might have used to help you is dedicated to God,' 6he is rid of his duty to father or mother. In this way you have made God's word null and void by means of your tradition. 7Hypocrites! It was you Isaiah meant when he so rightly prophesied: 8This people honors me only with lip service, while their hearts are far from me. — Anonymous

Perhaps it was simple reflex, her own instinct for survival. Or perhaps it had been his
words, bringing back the horror of her mother's death. But when he reached for the
satchel, Adrianne ignored the knife and brought her foot up hard between his legs. The
knife clattered to the ground only seconds before he did.
"Bastard," she muttered as she sent the knife careening into the dark. "Now your pride's
as small as your brain and just as useless."
"Well put," Philip said as he came up behind her. — Nora Roberts

If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick ... But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye? — Lisa See

My mother speaks of my step being a source of life-long pain to her, that it is a living death, etc. By the same post I had several letters from anxious relatives, telling me that it was my duty to come home and thus ease my mother's anxiety. — Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

A mother is an individual who'd go to any length for someone else, beyond rationality, beyond her physical body, her social bindings of state, country, her kind. That's the most horrifying individual you'll ever meet. — E.J. Koh

It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother's face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again ... — Marcel Proust

A mother's death also means the loss of the consistent, supportive family system that once supplied her with a secure home base, she then has to develop her self-confidence and self-esteem through alternate means. Without a mother or mother-figure to guide her, a daughter also has to piece together a female self-image of her own. — Hope Edelman

And what he contemplated was death. Some people complained when death came top early and claimed a child, a young mother, or a sailor with a family to provide for. He'd never understood that. Of course, it was a tragedy for those left behind and for the person who'd been robbed of the greater part of life. But it wasn't unfair. Death was beyond such notions. It seemed to him that the bereaved often forgot their grief at a death in favor of railing fruitlessly against life's injustices. After all, no one would dream of saying that the wind was unfair to the trees and the flowers. True, you might feel uneasy when the sun switched off its light, or ice gave your ship a dangerous list. But indignant, outraged, or angry, no. It was pointless. Nature was neither fair nor unfair. Those terms belonged to the world of men. — Carsten Jensen

It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast - which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life - then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life...
Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the mobility of creating. Was that impossible? — Hermann Hesse

Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother's elder brother. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I couldn't have children, I tried to for years. I've never been pregnant in my life. When I was a girl and fooling around I was scared to death I'd get pregnant, and then when I got married and wanted to have children I couldn't have any. But I don't miss it. I did for awhile, but I realize that I am everybody's mother. — Dolly Parton

It's the family motto," Ash said.
"Don't tell me, let me guess," Kami said, since Ash showed no signs of telling her. "Your motto is 'Blonds really do have more fun.' "
Another Lynburn motto possibility, if her mother was to be believed, was "Hot Blond Death. — Sarah Rees Brennan

People are usually pretty hungry after a funeral. I guess it's because we all realize that time is running out and we better eat all we can. Please don't mention that to my mother. — Peter Hedges

Lebedeva's eyes shone. Masha, listen to me. Cosmetics are an extension of the will. Why do you think all men paint themselves when they go to fight? When I paint my eyes to match my soup, it is not because I have nothing better to do than worry over trifles. It says, I belong here, and you will not deny me. When I streak my lips red as foxgloves, I say, Come here, male. I am your mate, and you will not deny me. When I pinch my cheeks and dust them with mother-of-pearl, I say, Death, keep off, I am your enemy, and you will not deny me. I say these things, and the world listens, Masha. Because my magic is as strong as an arm. I am never denied. — Catherynne M Valente

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

Mama's gaze pierced her. As a girl, Minerva had envied her mother's blue eyes. They'd seemed the color of tropical oceans and cloudless skies. But their color had faded over the years since Papa's death. Now their blue was the hue of dyed cambric worn three seasons. Or brittle middle-class china. The color of patience nearly worn through. — Tessa Dare

She cannot relax. The world around her is a living, breathing metaphor. The boat is her mother's frail body, groaning under Eleanor's weight. The sea is the poison that waits below, ready to consume her when she stumbles. The island is death, and she carves a resolute path - "a straight shot," as Jack said - to death's very door. Eleanor — Jason Gurley

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. — Margaret Sanger