“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.”
“People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, The baby is crying, you should feed her, and the maternal grandmother will say, Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?”
“You won t spoil your newborn if you hold them as much as you want to.”
“Our children want more than presents, that want our PRESENCE.”
“Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.”
“¨I am Lady, and still your mother.¨”
“Baby, I ve been thinking and now I am sure. You are the greatest woman I ve ever met.”
“Mothers are all slightly insane.”
“There s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”
“Motherhood is near to divinity. It is the highest, holiest service to be assumed by mankind.”
“It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?”
“She has watched every moment of your life, almost, and she loves you as God does, to the marrow of your bones.”
“Mothers got a hard road to travel, believe me.”
“You could run from someone you feared, you could try to fight someone you hated. All my reactions were geared toward those kinds of killers – the monsters, the enemies. When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?”
“Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.”
“Motherhood is a choice you make everyday, to put someone else s happiness and well-being ahead of your own, to teach the hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you re not sure what the right thing is...and to forgive yourself, over and over again, for doing everything wrong.”
“A mother knows what her child s gone through, even if she didn t see it herself.”