Books
13 of the Best Quotes About Motherhood From Books
If you're looking for a beautiful way to tell your mom you love her — after you've called and sent flowers and bought her a year's supply of artisanal cheeses, of course — it's not a bad idea to turn to the words of those who've gone before. That's what writers are good for, after all; putting universal sentiments into specific sentences. And just between us, I may have teared up a little while collecting these quotes. They're noble and loving and beautiful, just like a mother.
'Peter Pan' by J. M. Barrie
“‘Can anything harm us, mother, after the night-lights are lit?’‘Nothing, precious,’ she said; ‘they are the eyes a mother leaves behind her to guard her children.’”
'Jo's Boys' by Louisa May Alcott
“Mothers can forgive anything! Tell me all, and be sure that I will never let you go, though the whole world should turn from you.”
'The Dovekeepers' by Alice Hoffman
“Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.”
'The African Queen' by C.S. Forester
“When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.”
'Gadis Pantai' by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
“A mother knows what her child’s gone through, even if she didn’t see it herself.”
'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver
“A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after — oh, that’ s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She’s the one you can’t put down.”
'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' by Betty Smith
“’It’s come at last,’ she thought, ‘the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.’”
'The Diary of a Young Girl' by Anne Frank
“In the book Soldiers on the Home Front, I was greatly struck by the fact that in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. An what’s her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she’s disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, hear beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together.”
'The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms' by N.K. Jemisin
“In a child’s eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.”
'The Magnificent Ambersons' by Booth Tarkington
“Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it’s shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn’t he?”
'Anne's House of Dreams' by L.M. Montgomery
‘Oh, you mothers!’ he said. ‘You mothers! God knew what He was about when He made you.”
'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck
“From her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”
'Little Women' by Louisa May Alcott
“The clocks were striking midnight and the rooms were very still as a figure glided quietly from bed to bed, smoothing a coverlid here, settling a pillow there, and pausing to look long and tenderly at each unconscious face, to kiss each with lips that mutely blessed, and to pray the fervent prayers which only mothers utter.”
