Top 100 Maternal Quotes
#2. Suddenly, it occurred to me that my feelings towards the little man were distinctly maternal. Good God, I thought, how utterly revolting, and I turned my mind firmly to the problem at hand.
Laurie R. King
#3. She's floating outside in the maternal holding pattern all women learn after they have children, one that serves them well after grandchildren come along.
Greg Iles
#4. Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor.
Noel Coward
#5. He bit his lip in a manner which immediately awakened my maternal sympathy, and I helped him bite it.
S.J Perelman
#6. But as a matter of strict fact, did Agnes have any "maternal" in her? When she set her mouth that way, it was hard to see it. Oh shucks, all women had maternal instincts; science had proved that. Well, hadn't they?
Robert A. Heinlein
#7. I have no maternal instinct whatsoever. Motherhood holds no interest for me.
Helen Mirren
#8. I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.
Paul Gauguin
#9. I was raised by maternal grandparents who were born in 1890 and 1899, respectively. They were British subjects; George V was the cousin of the tsar. The Romanovs were very real in their household.
Kathryn Harrison
#10. It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child.
Maria Montessori
#11. Not one day of my mother's adult life passed without some critical demand on her maternal role, without some urgent response from her.
Rosemary Mahoney
#12. The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.
Matthew D. Lieberman
#13. Turning, she held her arms out to him in a maternal gesture. McKenna went to her at once, his black head lowering to her soft, round shoulder as he wept.
Lisa Kleypas
#14. To me the early childhood story is an ecumenical one. You take poverty seriously. You take seriously maternal depression. You take seriously children under stress and you take seriously the effects of extended hours participation in poor quality care. Those are the facts I begin with.
Robert Manne
#15. There's something about maternal love - it might just be the strongest human spiritual bond there is.
Guillermo Del Toro
#16. At 11, I went to live with my maternal nan and granddad temporarily, after my parents separated, and Nan would let me have a go on her piano. My grandparents were like something out of the Noel Coward play, 'This Happy Breed,' and it was magical to hear them sing music-hall songs.
Jools Holland
#17. Dismissing socialization and gender roles as piddling compared to this amorphous idea of 'maternal imperative' is part of the reason progress is stalled for family-friendly policies.
Jessica Valenti
#18. Rose blanched but complied, earning laughter in return from Dimitri. Rose Hathaway, notorious rebel, showing her maternal side.
Richelle Mead
#20. I don't have any regrets about not having kids. I've just never had those maternal feelings. I am a nurturer by nature, but I nurture adults: my friends, the people I work with. I don't want to nurture children.
Barbara Windsor
#21. I'm half-Welsh, half-Russian. My maternal grandmother is Russian. I've very much a mongrel, which is good in a way because it makes me quite a blank canvas.
Sophia Myles
#22. My maternal granddad, Leonard, was full of amazing stories. He was an orphan, with 11 or 12 brothers and sisters, and he used to tell us about growing up near the Irrawaddy river and how one brother was eaten by a crocodile.
Jamie Cullum
#23. I believe a woman, in order to be a good wife, must be (among other things) both sensual and maternal.
Elisabeth Elliot
#24. Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help ...
Edith Stein
#25. Where is God, even if he doesn't exist? I want to pray and to weep, to repent of crimes I didn't commit, to enjoy the feeling of forgiveness like a caress that's more than maternal.
Fernando Pessoa
#26. Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father's maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.
Vladimir Nabokov
#28. I would be the first to admit that my maternal instincts are not well developed
though in defense I must add that the raising of Ramses would have discouraged any woman.
Elizabeth Peters
#29. The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry.
Zora Neale Hurston
#30. The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.
Paul Farmer
#31. I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that.
Kelly Corrigan
#32. She was looking at him from under level brows; her face was grave and open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the maternal watch which is as old as the world.
G.K. Chesterton
#33. Midwives and doctors play a crucial role preventing unnecessary maternal deaths. They educate women about nutrition, health and family planning. And they step in when complications arise.
Liya Kebede
#34. The truth is women use contraception not only as a way to prevent unintended pregnancies, but also to improve their health and the health of their families. Increased access to contraception is directly linked to declines in maternal and infant mortality.
Felicity Huffman
#35. Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder that can significantly alter the maternal and in utero environment, leading to complications. Optimizing
T. Murphy Goodwin
#36. diverted him from the maternal side. If he did happen just now to be at home my solicitude would of course seem officious; for in his many wanderings - I believed
Henry James
#37. More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.
Marilynne Robinson
#38. The maternal duty of suckling her own children, prescribed to mothers by hygienists, is based on a physiological principle: the mother's milk nourishes an infant more perfectly than any other.
Maria Montessori
#40. In my late 30s, I flirted with the idea of having a child without necessarily being in a steady relationship. But I've never had a strong maternal urge, and then I got cancer of the womb - luckily caught at an early stage - so that put paid to that.
Kiki Dee
#41. Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.
Ayelet Waldman
#42. Right now I'm still only 25 and I don't think the maternal bug has hit me yet.
Karrie Webb
#43. In a contest of wills between John and his mother, he did not think John would prevail, indeed he hoped he would not. But he did not care to be a witness to their confrontation; he suspected Eleanor's methods would be neither maternal nor merciful.
Sharon Kay Penman
#44. I wanted very badly to be a mum. I'm a very maternal person. But at the point that I met Emilio I was focusing on a career. I never would have thought that I would get married at 21 and much less be a mum by 23.
Gloria Estefan
#45. The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research.
Elizabeth Blackwell
#46. I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.
Ayelet Waldman
#47. The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#49. I think a beautiful quality that's a biological, hormonal imperative for women, whether they have children or not, is that we're built to be empathic. For me, it was finally being maternal in an appropriate way instead of trying to mommy ex-boyfriends.
Alanis Morissette
#50. Unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me.
Charlotte Bronte
#51. I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.
Walter S. Sutton
#52. My mother's parents, Bernard and Rivka Levine, were from Russia and also immigrated to New York City. My mother, Rose, was the elder of their two daughters. My maternal grandmother's family included several scholars and professionals.
Robert Lefkowitz
#53. I take on everybody's problems. I have a very maternal side. I'm basically a very normal, down-to-earth person.
Shannen Doherty
#54. You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.
Hillary Clinton
#55. Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy
Leo Tolstoy
#56. I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic ...
Ursula K. Le Guin
#57. I was always very maternal with my friends. I wasn't the kind of little girl that played with dolls and pretended I was the mommy. I wasn't that child, so when I say I was always maternal, I don't mean in that sense - but I've always been a nurturer.
Kim Fields
#58. The first path a human being ever travels is the path that leads out of the maternal womb. Every human being's first labyrinth is that of a woman.
Jacques Attali
#59. You idiot! You misbegotten son of a jinn's meeting with a jackass, may the grave of your maternal grandmother be defiled by the dung of ten thousand syphilitic she-camels!
Anne McCaffrey
#60. I was born May 31, 1911, in Paris. My parents owned a small cheese shop, and my maternal grandfather was a carpentry worker. I thus came from what is commonly known as the working class.
Maurice Allais
#61. Almost all the United Commonwealth presidents have been female. It has been argued that women are less aggressive, more maternal, and thus more focused on the well-being of the country's people. Less focused on politics or power.
Joelle Charbonneau
#62. Maternal mortality health is a very sensitive indicator. All you need to look at is a country's maternal mortality rate. That is a surrogate for whether the country's health system is functioning. If it works for women, I'm sure it will work for men.
Margaret Chan
#63. I hated her as I had never hated anyone before - with her easy answers and maternal fussing. I wanted to slap her face, to make her crawl, and then to hold her in my arms and kiss her.
Daniel Keyes
#65. This was not a considered decision. Nor was it a gesture of charity, draped in a warm mantle of maternal kindness. No, this was an act of intuition, sprung from a deep and unspoken feminine knowledge of how the world functions.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#66. He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he'd been a naughty boy.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#67. Maternal health remains a staggering challenge, particularly in the developing world. Globally, a woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute.
Jessica Capshaw
#68. lifetime risk of maternal death is one thousand times higher in a poor country than in the West. That should be an international scandal. The gap, moreover, is getting wider.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#69. Maternal health generally gets minimal attention because those who die or suffer injuries overwhelmingly start with three strikes against them: They are female, they are poor, and they are rural. Women are marginalized in the developing world, They are an expendable commodity.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#70. Kloo nodded at Lex in an indescribably maternal way, somehow cramming a lifetime of compassion, support, and tenderness all into one slight bounce of the head.
Gina Damico
#71. This was her flaw as a parent, she thought later: she had never truly gotten rid of a single maternal worry. They were all in the closet, with the minuscule footed pajamas and hand-knit baby hats, and every day Laura took them out, unfolded them, tried to put them to use.
Elizabeth McCracken
#72. Prenatal care is one of the most effective ways to reduce maternal mortality because it identifies complications or high risks before emergency situations.
Liya Kebede
#73. My maternal family are South African and when I was small and my parents separated my mother and I went back to South Africa. So for me the emergence of my own childhood consciousness was in the context of 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa and the movement there.
Rachel Holmes
#74. I've given you everything," she insisted again and again in her last days. "Yes," I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She'd come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.
Cheryl Strayed
#75. One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you - and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.
Isabella Rossellini
#76. No one believes me when I talk about this, but I'm really, really maternal.
Megan Fox
#77. The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals, but it doesn't operate in this region. It's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut funding.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#78. The most basic parental bond is maternal. Equal parenting is great--it has forced men to get off their duffs--but women, from breast to cradle to cuddle, can nurture in ways that men cannot.
Charles Krauthammer
#79. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.
Gregory Maguire
#80. My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
Umberto Eco
#82. Ancestor. In fact, this clock tells us that all seven billion people alive today can trace their maternal lineage to one woman who lived in Africa 170,000 years ago, dubbed Mitochondrial Eve.
Sam Kean
#83. Edward Campbell Lowe was a radical in his blood and in his bones... his maternal grandfather had famously made a bonfire with a valuable portrait of the Marquess of Bute because, he had declared, it was more than a man could stomach to encounter a Tory every morning before breakfast.
Clare Clark
#84. It's thematic in my career, if you look at most of my choices. It is some level of exploration of maternal angst and maternal heroism.
Vera Farmiga
#85. But the heart of a woman is such that, however arid it may become when the winds of prejudice and the demands of etiquette have blown across it, there always remains one corner that is radiant and fertile
-the one that God has dedicated to maternal love.
Alexandre Dumas
#86. I come from a strong matriarchal line. I was raised by Gypsy, her sister, Mary, and my maternal grandmother. The result of not having my father live with us meant that, when it came to understanding the opposite sex, it was like working without a map.
Cherie Lunghi
#87. How can she explain to Gustaf that within the magic circle of maternal energy, Irena has never manage to rule over her own life? How can she explain that the constant proximity of the mother would throw her back, into her weakness, her immaturity?
Milan Kundera
#88. Children make that big a difference to you? He asked. I nodded. Yeah, they do. I never figured you as the maternal type. I'm not, but kids are people, Edward, little people trapped by the choices the adults around them make.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#89. Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
#90. She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space- all meteors, no atmosphere.
Laura Kasischke
#91. (Alice Balint)called maternal love removed from reality, 'archaic love', and regarded it as the predecessor of civilized maternal love. This archaic love is based on the feeling that the child's body was part of the mother's body; it is hers and she can do with it as she pleases.
Terez Virag
#92. Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring.
Frans De Waal
#93. In the case of maternal health care, you look at, well naturally, it's the mother who's the customer, who makes the decisions. But in truth, the mother in many areas, in certain parts of India, the mother has very little decision-making power at all. The real decision-maker is the mother-in-law.
Jacqueline Novogratz
#94. I had a great mother, and I'm very comfortable with that maternal element.
Greg Bryk
#95. I'm not going to defile my fingers with him,' said I, in answer to the maternal intercession. 'I wouldn't touch him with the tongs.' I
Anne Bronte
#97. Another maternal insight --- you always dislike about your children that which you dislike about yourself because you understand the danger about that trait. ~ Dorothea Benton Frank, The Hurricane Sisters, p. 115.
Dorothea Benton Frank
#98. I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time.
Karen Armstrong
#99. Maternal love, like an orange tree, buds and blossoms and bears at once. When a woman puts her finger for the first time into the tiny hand of her baby and feels that helpless clutch which tightens her very heartstrings, she is born again with her newborn child.
Kate Douglas Wiggin
#100. Contrary to previous assumptions, maternal depression can also manifest in a myriad of ways, many far different from what some might consider traditional depressive symptoms, including psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other anxiety disorders.
Kimberly McCreight
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