Mother Guilt Quotes

#1. My daughter Gabby very kindly once said that she thinks I was a better mother because I was doing a job I loved. I now think guilt is a universal part of being a mother. I used to think it was Jewish-mother guilt but now I think it is working-mother guilt.

Donna Karan

#2. Some things get worse when you share them," Jonathan said. "Dad was wise enough not to forget that." Evelyn looked at him and waited, seeming to hope that if he had said this much, he might say more. "Mother," he said, "there is not enough guilt in the world to make me forget it, either.

T. Ellery Hodges

#3. My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce.

Mitch Albom

#4. My mother started to suffer from multiple sclerosis, but nobody knew what MS was then. My father didn't - and later he suffered a great deal of guilt over that. It was an awful business and very fraught.

Ruth Rendell

#5. Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.

Evan Esar

#6. Once you become a mother, you always have a guilt trip. You always try to do the best, but you feel you can always be better.

Gal Gadot

#7. Balance is Impossible; Memories are Better.

Marci Fair

#8. Guilt management can be just as important as time management for mothers.

Sheryl Sandberg

#9. My mother is now in the hospital 60 miles away, where they are treating her pneumonia. I refuse to feel guilty. Guilt is a destructive emotion and doesn't fit in with my Life Plan.

Sue Townsend

#10. She always imagined the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Blessed Mother as points of light in the center of her heart, and as she prayed, the light expanded, flowing through her body and soul, smoothing away knots of guilt and sorrow and fear until her whole being glowed with harmony.

Mary Jo Putney

#11. Balance in impossible; memories are better. (TILT-7 Solutions To Be A Guilt-free Working Mom)

Marci Fair

#12. So now I spend my weekends with my mother in Petaluma, out of guilt.

Karina Halle

#13. I felt like I needed to comfort both the little girl inside me and my mother, assuring them that neither of them could have prevented the rape. I didn't want my mother to blame herself and I didn't want to blame the little girl inside of me for not speaking up at the age of six.

Erin Merryn

#14. I know strong cages that are narrow and difficult to avoid: the cages of love. I'm not sure if others build them, like a tailor makes clothes fitted for you, or if you make them on your own. Whether it's the love of a mother, of a child, or of a mate, all cages are made of threats and guilt.

Sibyl Von Der Schulenburg

#15. My mother should have been Jewish. She could have taught a class on how to induce guilt.

Lorna Luft

#16. When I feel like I'm not doing what I am supposed to as a mother, I will torture myself. I don't know how to deal with it. I find some consolation in the fact that all mommies feel it. If there was a way to cure mommy guilt, I would bottle it and be a bazillionaire.

Angie Harmon

#17. Got something to do with guilt,' Toro said. 'Her mother,neh?'
'Guilt. Longing. Got something to do with all of us.

Kiana Davenport

#18. Sarah's death and how it haunted you, how you were swallowed by your guilt. But your mother was at least partially responsible for how you handled that situation as well. Let's not forget that you were just a kid. With the right guidance, you might have come through that incident better." Jones

Lisa Unger

#19. Peabody only smiled. Guilt was the best tool, she knew. She'd learned that one at her mother's knee.

J.D. Robb

#20. I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn't realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.

Naomi Benaron

#21. The Mommy Wars, as they stand today, serve as an effective check on the ambitions of the American mother. The phenomenon keeps women in a perpetual state of guilt, shame and inadequacy, and does so without involving anyone but wealthy white women.

Shannon Drury

#22. Are we bereft of citizenship because we are mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people? Have women no country
no interests staked in public weal
no liabilities in common peril
no partnership in a nation's guilt and shame?

Angelina Grimke

#23. My mother's dying and may not live through the week. So, yes, I'd rather die trying to save her than live with the guilt of wondering if I could have. If you can't understand caring that much for someone you love then you're one coldhearted bastard. (Abbie)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#24. For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling vaguely guilty.

William S. Burroughs

#25. Know that every mother occasionally feels "at the end of her rope." When you reach the end of your rope, don't add guilt to your frustration. No one said motherhood was going to be easy.

Heather King

#26. Have to love the preemptive guilt trip! I will be visiting home for Mother's Day. Hoping for minimal "baby cannon" talk, but realistically that's going to be a big part of the day.

Kate Siegel

#27. What else happened?' she asked, not because she was particularly interested, but because one must talk to one's mother when she came to visit one, however tired and dispirited one felt.

Monica Dickens

#28. My mother's story continues to haunt me, it will until the day I die. My guilt and personal anguish is a good thing. It propelles me to strive to become the man my mother wanted me to be.

M.J. Burke Sr.

#29. I had a lot of guilt as a single mother trying to raise a child. I had to go to work and Jeffrey was screaming that he didn't want me to. You have to give yourself permission to let go of the guilt.

Sherri Shepherd

#30. And daughters who are so hopeless at doing the done thing and sticking to the rules are automatically paralyzed with guilt whenever they come within fifty yards of a mother like Margaret.

Susan Howatch

#31. She turned; she bruised under her heel the scaly head of this dark suspicion-as terrifying to her as his guilt was to him. 'O Absalom, my Absalom! Come, come, we will not entertain such a thought. God himself would not urge it upon a mother.

Theodore Dreiser

#32. You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.

Anne Lamott

#33. Food ... love ... mother ... career ... Live every day to the fullest. Partake of the four basic guilt groups.

Cathy Guisewite

#34. The realities of motherhood are often obscured by a halo of illusions. The future mother tends to fantasize about love and happiness and overlooks the other aspects of child-rearing: the exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, and even depression, with its attendant state of guilt.

Elisabeth Badinter