Part Time Mother Quotes & Sayings

[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

They were unfailing in their love for me, and most of the time they had gotten nothing in return. Maybe that last part was the proof that my mother was right. They only gave, and I only took. — Amanda Hocking

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it. — Alexandra Adornetto

I'm used to very strong women because my mother was particularly strong, and my father was away all the time. My mother was a big part of bringing up three boys, so I was fully versed in the strength of a powerful woman, and accepted that as the status quo. — Ridley Scott

I realized that so much of the pressure I was feeling was from outside sources, and I knew I wasn't ready to take that step into motherhood. Being a biological mother just isn't part of my experience this time around. — Kim Cattrall

Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother's Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together - the moments when her child had been just like other people's. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone. — Jodi Picoult

The world is full of what seem like intractable problems. Often we let that paralyze us. Instead, let is spur you to action. There are some people in the world that we can't help, but there are so many more that we can. So when you see a mother and her children suffering in another part of the world, don't look away. Look right at them. Let them break your heart, then let your empathy and your talents help you make a difference in the lives of others. Whether you volunteer every week or just a few times a year, your time and unique skills are invaluable. — Melinda Gates

Next Wednesday is part of our routine, another chance to spend lunch hour doing it somewhere else in Kim's immaculate house. Maybe on the white leather couch next time, the one she loves too much to even let me sit on. — Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

I don't want to hear the scary part. But at the same time she does want to hear the scary part, everyone wants to hear the scary part, we're all mad here, and her mother really did say that if you told your dreams they wouldn't come true, which meant you were supposed to tell the nightmares and save the good ones for yourself, hide them like a tooth under the pillow. — Stephen King

It was in Cardiff, and the cast was 60 per cent Welsh-speaking. It's the first time I've walked into a rehearsal room speaking my mother tongue, which in itself was a breath of fresh clean air from the Welsh mountains. Singing Hans Sachs is always a milestone, but I was happy to be part of such an achievement, not personally but as a company. — Bryn Terfel

The long ghosts are walking the halls. When my mother died I felt expanded, slowly, durably, over time. I felt suffused with her truth, spread through, as with water, color or light. I thought she'd entered the deepest place I could provide, the animating entity, the thing, if anything, that will survive my own last breath, and she makes me larger, she amplifies my sense of what it is to be human. She is part of
me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully. It is only a statement of the power of what comes after. — Don DeLillo

After wolf number 10, the father of the first group of pups born in the park, was killed by a local hunter after wandering south of park boundaries, program officials rounded up the mother and the helpless pups, put them back into the acclimation pen, and provided them with food for several months. Even when the pups got a bit older, program managers feared that the mother would have a hard time taking care of them by herself when they were released. Then, on the day they were to be released, in an event that no biologist has yet been able to explain, a bachelor wolf living miles away in another part of the park showed up outside the pen, just in time to form a new family unit. — William R. Lowry

One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times ... He is beyond human forgiveness. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting. — Richard Russo

I knew that before I asked ... but part of me can't help hoping that maybe this time, he'll love me."
"As I can't help hoping that my mother will rise, and will once again be the woman who sang me such lullabies that the world stood still." Pulling her into a crushing embrace, he pressed his lips to her temple. "We are both fools. — Nalini Singh

Being a biological mother just isn't part of my experience this time around. However, I am a mother who continues to give birth to ideas and ways of experiencing life that challenge the norm. — Kim Cattrall

Her mother had always said that there was strength and power in the time right before dawn, and those who slept through it missed the best part of the day. — David Thurlo

We want Max to ... breed. To produce heirs. Who will govern the world after she dies."
Dead silence for quite some time. We all stared at Dr. Hans, our jaws dropped to various levels. Our lives had reached a new low of inhumanity.
My face flushed. Part of me had assumed, hoped, that if Fang and I lived long enough, we would get married. Maybe have a little flock of our own. But i really hadn't planned it all out. And he was gone now, anyway. How could I possibly ever find someone ...
My eyes scanned Dylan's face, I saw his discomfort.
"Oh, no," I said in horror.
"Yes," Angel confirmed. "Freaking unbelievable. — James Patterson

Happiness, she would explain, was when a person felt good, light, creative, content, loving and loved, and free. An unhappy person felt as if there were barriers crushing her desires and the talents she had inside. A happy woman was one who could exercise all kinds of rights, from the right to move to the right to create, compete, and challenge, and at the same time could be loved for doing so. Part of happiness was to be loved by a man who enjoyed your strength and was proud of your talents. Happiness was also about the right to privacy, the right to retreat from the company of others and plunge into contemplative solitude. Or sit by yourself doing nothing for a whole day, and not give excuses or feel guilty about it either. Happiness was to be with loved ones, and yet still feel that you existed as a separate being, that ou were not just there to make them happy. Happiness was when there was a balance between what you gave and what you took. — Fatema Mernissi

As she took her father's arm and prepared to march down the aisle, Margaret called, "Do not forget what I told you about tonight." How could I? Angelica thought as her mother's lecture about the wedding night and the marriage bed flitted through her mind. "There will be incredible pain the first time, darling," Margaret had said. "And you might bleed. But you must submit to him without complaint until you are pregnant with his heir. After that, he should leave you alone for the most part and fulfill his baser desires on a mistress. — Brooklyn Ann

This time of year is brutal. Joe knows exactly what Donny's referring to. It's January, just after the holiday season, a time for family and gift giving and celebration for most, a time of unbearable depression for others. The days are cold and dark by four thirty. Joe and Donny have responded to a lot of suicides over the years, and winter is sadly the most popular season. Joe won't miss that part of his job. Discovering the bodies. Sometimes the body parts. A teenager overdoses on heroin. A mother swallows a bottle of prescription pills. A father leaps off the Tobin. A cop eats his gun. — Lisa Genova

He wondered what part of Meridith's childhood had left her afraid of something as natural and necessary as love. Was it her mother's mental illness? T. J.'s leaving her? If she'd only open up to him, maybe he could help her sort it out. He was a patient man. He'd wait her out, love her until she realized he was safe. But she was unwilling to try. Wanted to run as far and fast as she could from what he offered. What was he supposed to do? He couldn't make her try, force her to shed her fears. If only he could make her see what she was missing. But he was running out of time. He was nearly finished with the house, had two weeks, tops, if she didn't kick him out first. And soon after that she was leaving the island. And — Denise Hunter

He said it hit him travelling one time in the year or so before he met my mother. Whatever country of the world it was, the poor were starting to look alike, live alike, eat alike, and dress alike in the same kind of clothes all made in the same part of China. To him, it was a sign that the people had got severed from the land. — Marcel Theroux

The absence of the Beloved is Hell, is imprisonment. And that absence fuels love until the prisoner becomes a conflagration of yearning. Sometimes the absent beloved is a woman, sometimes it is democracy, sometimes it is the dreams of youth. But always, always, separation is just a catapult to a new level of love. Each time he was imprisoned, each time he and my mother were forced apart, he would write to her - half-teasing, half-tender - of his immersion in that metaphor. In part because he believed it; in part because he would do everything he could to keep her from pain. — Kamila Shamsie

I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, even during the long period when I was cooking under my mother's supervision and with the benefit of her experience. I still fail all the time, in particular when I turn to baking. After hundreds of attempts, following dozens of different formulas, I don't think I have ever made what I would consider to be a completely successful pie crust. Disaster is somehow part of the appeal of cooking for me. If that first Velvet Crumb Cake had turned out to be a flop, I don't know if I would have pursued my interest in cooking. But cooking entails stubbornness and a tolerance
maybe even a taste
for last-minute collapse. You have to be able to enjoy the repeated and deliberate following of a more of less lengthy, more or less complicated series of steps whose product is very likely
after all that work, with no warning, right at the end
to curdle, sink, scorch, dry up, congeal, burn, or simply taste bad. — Michael Chabon

If we are like God, we can only be God. Is that what you mean?"

"Oh, I think it is more than that. A robin is like a hawk, but it is also different. The Goddess Mother created us as reflections of herself. God to me is the Great Mother. God to me is the Old One. But it does not really matter; God is God. Life force is life force. God is the creator, the Great Spirit that permeates all of us. Once you truly understand that, Catherine, you realize that we are all part of one another, that we are in agreement on this wonderful, green earth, and that we live in a state of duality, a state of separateness that is not real. We are separated by an agreement called space and time. — Lynn V. Andrews

I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches. — Marilynne Robinson

For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she'd let me go. — Anna Quindlen

eat here every day if I could. I'm surprised you never heard about this place, seeing as you're part Texan.' The jab had her smiling. 'My grandmother was a great cook, and we ate in almost all the time. As a kid I'd beg to go to a fast food joint, but she'd never allow it unless it was my birthday. Looking back I can see what a dope I was as a kid.' 'My mother was either working or going — Mary Burton

Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity. — Flannery O'Connor

Cleaning and painting finished, the next target was the big ware press in the parlour. Out came delicate china which had been in the family for years. My mother's respect for the Stations weighed against her fear of breakage, but the Stations won every time. Once when a precious jug was broken she mourned it for days, telling us all how long it had been in the family. Finally, Dan, our part-time travelling farm worker, said, "Missus, if it was here that long it was time to break it." And that was the end of that. — Alice Taylor

I hate to say that my mother was 'just a housewife', because in addition to that she has had lots of part-time secretarial jobs in factories and hospitals, always working really hard for our family. — Kelly Reilly

Scripture has always been a part of my life. My dad was a pastor. My mother was a speaker, writer, and teacher. I memorized Scripture from the time I was little. — Gloria Gaither

I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time — Marilynne Robinson

The legacy of women's war work is our present post-industrial employment structure. It was the war that created the demand for a technologically advanced, de-skilled, low-paid, non-unionized female workforce and paved the way for making part-time work the norm for married women now. A generation later, it was the daughters of wartime women workers who completed their mothers' campaign for equal pay. — Linda Grant

Rosie: I don't know what you're talking about! I am not waiting for Alex!
Ruby: Yes you are, my dear friend. He must be some man because nobody can ever measure up to him. And I know that's what you do every time you meet someone: compare. I'm sure he's a fabulous friend and I'm sure he always says sweet and wonderful thing to you. But he's not here. He's thousands of miles away, working as a doctor in a great big hospital and he lives in a fancy apartment with his fancy doctor fiancee. I don't think he's thinking of leaving that life anytime soon to come back to a single mother who's living in a tiny flat working in a crappy part-time job in a paperclip factory with a crazy friend who emails her every second. So stop waiting and move on. Live your life. — Cecelia Ahern

I'm part of the tribe who have said goodbye to one parent and are feeling a sense of responsibility for the one who remains - in my case, my mother. How do I make her time smoother, happier? How do I try to ease her, a widow, away from the dark well of grief without dishonoring the necessity of that grief? — Patti Davis

The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn't easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn't reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes. — Isabel Allende

Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing
rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other. — C.S. Lewis

Falling in love for the first time, and then the heartbreak of having it end, is difficult, but I don't think it would ever hurt as much as when my mother was killed in the boating accident. I feel a part of my heart has already been broken, and that place is reserved for mother. — Natasha Gregson Wagner

Even as we grew up, my mother could not help imposing herself between her children and whatever it was they might take it in mind to reach out for in the world. For she would get it for them, if it was good enough for them
she would have to be very sure
and give it to them, at whatever cost to herself: valiance was in her very fibre. She stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed tend to make the world look dangerous, and so it had been to her. A way had to be found around her love sometimes, without challenging that, and at the same time cherishing it in its unassailable strength. Each of us children did, sooner or later, in part at least, solve this in a different, respectful, complicated way. — Eudora Welty

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps. — James W. Loewen

she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn't hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over. — Jojo Moyes

She talked about work; he talked about school. Carmella mentioned that she might be up for a promotion by the end of the year, and Adam said that Group, in the end, might work out after all. And during that whole time, they told each other everything except for the part that they didn't. Mother and son were as honest as two people lying to each other could be. — Teresa Toten

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one ... each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment. — Mark Lawrence

For the first time in this 11 years
I have come to love the darkness
for I believe now that it is a part, a very, very small part of Jesus' dakness and pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it [as] a "spiritual side of 'your work'" ... (Mother Teresa, quoated in Kolodiejchuk, p. 208). — Brian Kolodiejchuk

Like its author, this book is dedicated to Jen Schwalbach - the gorgeous mother of my child, the seductive temptress who keeps me faithful, and the friend I've always had the most fun with. My best friend, even.
Also quite like the author, this book is additionally dedicated to Jen Schwalbach asshole.
Everything above also applies here, obviously, except the "mother of my child" part: referencing my kid and my wife's brown eye in the same sentiment might come off as crude or something.
(And I have a heart: Please don't go telling my kid you read in her old man's book that she's some kinda Butt-Baby. She's gonna have a hard enough time being Silent Bob's daughter - the daughter of the "Too Fat to Fly" guy.
Also: Pleas don't tell my daughter I dedicated tge vook to her mother's sphincter. That'd be weird) — Kevin Smith

The time we spend in having our daily audience with God is the most precious part of the whole day. — Mother Teresa

Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly
and irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all
that was her own. He understood that these feelings really were her secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for
years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and distracted step mother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches. But at the same time he knew now and knew for
certain that, although it filled her with dread and suffering, yet she had a tormenting desire to read and to read to him that he might hear it, and to read now whatever might come of it! ... He read this in her eyes, he could see it in her intense emotion. She mastered herself, controlled the spasm in her throat and went on reading the eleventh chapter of St.
John. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Losing this part of my life, this time of being a mother to growing children, is indeed an ending. For months, I've carried that quiet sorrow, getting used to its heaviness, the way one learns to live with the chronic soreness of a joint, a tenderness in wrist or knee. What I long to do now is to let the sadness go as well, to have faith that even as my sons graduate from high school and leave home, and this phase of our family life draws to a close, there will be new beginnings not just for them, but for all of us. — Katrina Kenison

But it isn't easy to find the right person. It would have to be someone good with kids and horses, and ho'd be able to pitch in with the administrating to some extent and wouldn't quibble about shoving manure.Plus I'd have to be able to depend on them, and get along with them. And they'd have to be diplomatic with parents, which is often the trickiest part."
Travis picked up his soft drink again. "I might be able to point you in the right direction there."
"Oh? Listen, Dad, I appreciate it, but you know, a friend of a friend or the son or daughter of an aquaintance. That kind of thing gets very sticky if it doesn't work out."
"Actually, I was thinking of someone a little closer to home.Your mother."
"Ma?" With a half laugh, Keeley sat again. "Ma doesn't want this headache, even if she had time for it."
"Shows what you know." Smug now, he drank. "Just mention it to her, casually. I won't say a word about it. — Nora Roberts

As a child Gottfried was very close to his mother, and his memories of those early years are sunny and warm. But before he turned ten, his mother developed cancer, and died in great pain. The young boy could have felt sorry for himself and become depressed, or he could have adopted hardened cynicism as a defense. Instead he began to think of the disease as his personal enemy, and swore to defeat it. In time he earned a medical degree and became a research oncologist, and the results of his work have become part of the pattern of knowledge that eventually will free mankind of this scourge. In this case, again, a personal tragedy became transformed into a challenge that can be met. In developing skills to meet that challenge, the individual improves the lives of other people. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

At the beginning of the semester, when you asked who I loved the most, an image of my mother popped in my head. When you asked me who I loved the most for the second time, it wasn't an image of my mother. Instead, it was replaced by an image of a strawberry blonde with big, blue eyes.
It took me a long time to figure out the exact moment I fell in love with her, partly because I denied that I did until it was too late.
I fucked up so badly and did so many things wrong, to the point of no return, so I let her go. The selfless part inside of me wants to say I did the right thing, and the selfish part of me thinks I made the biggest mistake of my life. I guess the selfless side won out because, every time I look at her and see what I did, I realize I don't deserve her.
I was never supposed to fall in love with her, but that was the best mistake of my life. I will always love her; I have ever since I purposely bumped into her in the hallway. — Sarah Brianne

My mother was a continual source of wisdom and great advice ... she taught me that there is always a way around a problem-you've just got to find it. Keep trying doors; one will eventually open. She also taught me to accept failure as part and parcel of life. It's not the opposite of success; it's an integral part of success.
I talk a lot about learning to become fearless in your approach to life. But fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's the mastery of fear. It's all about getting up one more time than you fall down. — Arianna Huffington

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers ... shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. — Salman Rushdie

The necessity that the foods selected and used shall provide an adequate quantity of fat-soluble activators (including the known fatsoluble vitamins) is so imperative and is so important in preventing a part of our modern degeneration that I shall illustrate its need with another practical case. A mother asked my assistance in planning the nutritional program for her boy. She reported that he was five years of age and that he had been in bed in hospitals with rheumatic fever, arthritis and an acute heart involvement most of the time for the past two and a half years. She had been told that her boy would not recover, so severe were the complications. As is so generally the case with rheumatic fever and endocarditis, this boy was suffering from severe tooth decay. In this connection the — Anonymous

My mother kept alive the best part for my sister and me. At the same time, she's always been someone who's very straight and solid, which wasn't that -common in families with "'68er" parents. — Clemence Poesy

But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn't try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him. — Maggie Nelson

If, for example, a drone bee in a hive has decided to lay down on its brothers and only do a half job, does Mother Nature agree and find a part time work for the special bee? She does not. She impresses the other bees, who are working hard to collect the honey and fill the hive, to send their soldiers after the drone. It is politely marched outside and stung to death. Nature destroys a lazy bee. — Raymond Holliwell

You know about the Mother Goddess - the first female god, a fat woman with a lion on one side and a child between her legs. She was the first god of humankind.
Do you know why than ancient people of Anatolia chose her as their god? Because men were not aware of their roles as impregnators. They thought that it was the wind, the rain, the rivers, in short, nature, that impregnated women. And this was not at all a strange idea at the time. People viewed themselves as part of nature. They thought birth was magic, a miracle. — Ahmet Umit

Because she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn't hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over. You didn't need her. You didn't need anyone. And without even knowing you were doing it, you waited. You waited for anyone who got close to you to see something they didn't like in you, something they hadn't initially seen, and to grow cold and disappear, too, like so much sea mist. Because there had to be something wrong, didn't there, if even your own mother didn't really love you? — Jojo Moyes

[On Jung's theory of psychological types:] My mother, Katharine C. Briggs, introduced it into our family and made it a part of our lives. She and I waited a long time for someone to devise an instrument that would reflect not only one's preference for extraversion or introversion but one's preferred kind of perception and judgment as well. In the summer of 1942 we undertook to do it ourselves. — Isabel Briggs Myers

Many of my classmates have happier memories of Blessed Sacrament, and in time I would find my own satisfaction in the classroom. My first years there, however, I met with little warmth. In part, it was that the nuns were critical of working mothers, and their disapproval was felt by latchkey kids. The irony of course was that my mother wouldn't have been working such long hours if not to pay for that education she believed was the key to any aspirations for a better life. — Sonia Sotomayor

Very early on in writing the series, I remember a female journalist saying to me that Mrs Weasley, 'Well, you know, she's just a mother.' And I was absolutely incensed by that comment. Now, I consider myself to be a feminist, and I'd always wanted to show that just because a woman has made a choice, a free choice to say, 'Well, I'm going to raise my family and that's going to be my choice. I may go back to a career, I may have a career part time, but that's my choice.' Doesn't mean that that's all she can do. And as we proved there in that little battle, Molly Weasley comes out and proves herself the equal of any warrior on that battlefield. — J.K. Rowling

He spread out his hood more than ever, and Rikki-tikki saw the spectacle-mark on the back of it that looks exactly like the eye part of a hook-and-eye fastening. He was afraid for the minute, but it is impossible for a mongoose to stay frightened for any length of time, and though Rikki-tikki had never met a live cobra before, his mother had fed him on dead ones, and he knew that all a grown mongoose's business in life was to fight and eat snakes. Nag knew that too and, at the bottom of his cold heart, he was afraid. — Rudyard Kipling

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother's palm and fingertips, he was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I'd always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph's part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air. — Aimee Bender

In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother's first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air. — Charlotte Mason