#motherhood

If it weren’t for her setting me free, I may still be a caged bird today, holding my own daughter captive on a shit-laden perch. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#breaking-free #caged-bird #cycles #freedom #motherhood

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#motherhood #pygmalion #shaw #imagination

The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . . Memories of mother drying my tears, reading aloud, cutting cookies and singing as she did, listening to prayers I said as I knelt with my forehead pressed against her knee, tucking me in bed and turning down the light. They have carried me through the years and given my life such a firm foundation that it does not rock beneath flood or tempest. ↗

— Margaret Sanger

#mothers #life

I wondered if perhaps I'd gone mad. I had known this man less than twenty-four hours and already I wanted to raise his children. ↗

— Lucy Robinson

#insanity #motherhood #love

It's the curse of motherhood. You're required to love us even when we vex you. ↗

— Julia Quinn

#motherhood #parenting-children #love

I'd just done the most important thing a person can ever do. I'd made life. At the very instant he was put into my arms, I loved this new person more than anyone but a mother can understand. ↗

— J. Matthew Nespoli

#love #motherhood #love

Mothers who know do less. They permit less of what will not bear good fruit eternally. They allow less media in their homes, less distraction, less activity that draws their children away from their home. Mothers who know are willing to live on less and consume less of the world’s goods in order to spend more time with their children—more time eating together, more time working together, more time reading together, more time talking, laughing, singing, and exemplifying. These mothers choose carefully and do not try to choose it all. ↗

— Julie B. Beck

#parenting #media

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine ↗

— Fay Weldon

#motherhood #she-may-not-leave #guilt

A mother knows what her child's gone through, even if she didn't see it herself. ↗

— Pramoedya Ananta Toer

#motherhood

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#motherhood #motherhood