Mother I Never Had Quotes

#1. I see a huge paradox in me - the intense need to be loved and the search for approval juxtaposed with the need to nurture other people, to be the mother I never had.

Madonna Ciccone

#2. She is the mother I never had, she is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves. I don't know a better person.

Oprah Winfrey

#3. By the grace of God, my parents were fantastic. We were a very normal family, and we have had a very middle-class Indian upbringing. We were never made to realise who we were or that my father and mother were huge stars - it was a very normal house, and I'd like my daughter to have the same thing.

Abhishek Bachchan

#4. My mother was asked to be a model when she was younger, but my father had not let her, so she was quite keen on me becoming a model. I just went off without telling my dad. I took off to Paris and never came back, but when I became a success and started making money, he was very proud of me.

Jerry Hall

#5. Even at al my mother's concerts, I had never seen people go crazy the way they did with the Beatles.

Lorna Luft

#6. My mother often says that she could never have done it if I had been the youngest, if she had other small children she had to cart around New York City for my auditions and go-sees (modeling auditions) and stuff.

Katherine Heigl

#7. My mother had a look on her face that I'll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.

Amy Tan

#8. I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.

Anna Quindlen

#9. He swaggered over to my mother, and kissed her so long and slow that my own cheeks started to burn, because I was sure the neighbors would see. When he lifted his head, my mother's eyes were a color I had never seen before and don't think I have ever seen again.

Jodi Picoult

#10. We just kept moving back and forth because my mother never had a job. We kept getting kicked out of every house we were in. I believe six months was the longest we ever lived in a house.

Eminem

#11. I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

Alice Walker

#12. I had never confronted my parents with the true feelings I had for them, and I had certainly never expressed the depth of my feeling for my mother, being too selfish to try when I should have.

Brooke Hayward

#13. I always had the sense that nothing was never good enough - striving for perfection. My mother and I had a sort of typical mother-daughter relationship.

Dorothy Hamill

#14. I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.

Emily Dickinson

#15. My mother was a very absent mother. She was going out, she was drinking a lot, she liked to have fun. It's fine with me. I have no bitterness about it. When I was 3, she went to America for months. I never had any problems with that. I even liked it.

Sophie Calle

#16. 'Who was your mother?' 'Never had none!' said the child, with another grin. 'Never had any mother? What do you mean? Where were you born?' 'Never was born!' 'Do you know who made you?' 'Nobody, as I knows on,' said the child, with a short laugh ... 'I 'spect I grow'd.'

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#17. Don't be like my mother when my father had a heart attack. My mother had never handled the finances. I don't ever want to see anybody go through that. Women shouldn't be in that position.

Lisa Caputo

#18. My mother used to tell me to be a leader, never a follower. As a respect to my the words of my mother, I cannot place my faith in God or anyone else, because if I do, I am merely a follower. In order to respect my mother's wishes, I had to dethrone God himself and claim the title as leader.

Lionel Suggs

#19. Had my father loved my mother? He never spoke of her. I always imagined a traditional marriage between them--one built with the strong bones of respect, but stripped of the soft skin of love.

Kay Honeyman

#20. I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

Stephen King

#21. Had passed between them on this score wasn't so and could never be. Later on, through his mother, I had his version of that, but I may remark that I gave it no credit. Poor Mrs. Nettlepoint, on the other hand, was of course to give it all. I was almost capable, after the girl had left me, of

Henry James

#22. I was in control of what people thought of me, but I had no control over what they thought of my mother. When I asked my mother, 'How do I tell people about you?' her answer was, 'Tell the truth'. But of course, the truth is never simple.

Jeannette Walls

#23. When I was growing up and trying to get my foot on the ladder, I had the self-belief that my mother taught me, and it never occurred to me that anything could go wrong. I've learned life can't be like that.

Diana Quick

#24. I want to be the father I never had and the husband my mother was cheated out of. So if I have to take off my fucking clothes to make the money I need, I'll do it. And I pray you want me enough to suffer through it. Because I promise I'll make it up to you for the rest of my life.

Marissa Carmel

#25. I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.

Alice Sebold

#26. My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers.

Samuel Beckett

#27. I am lucky to have had an attentive, curious and loving dad and heart-smart, down-to-earth, gifted mother. They changed the outlooks of their own lives and have never forgotten the people and organizations that helped them dream bigger than their circumstances should have allowed.

Jennifer Garner

#28. My father had played cornet, although I never saw him play it. I found his mouthpiece when I was a kid. I used to buzz it. And my mother played piano and sang in the church choir for different functions. So there was always music in the house, jazz, gospel, or whatever. Especially jazz records.

Johnny Griffin

#29. All I cared was that she had never lied. She was honest in a world just the opposite, and a cool oasis in my life. She was who she said she was, and everything Sophia, my mother, the pathologically manipulative liar, had never been.

Rob Thurman

#30. I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.

Gloria Steinem

#31. I have a mother who never took no for an answer when it came to her creative pursuits. She started a hair salon in her spare bedroom and four years later had 30 employees.

Solange Knowles

#32. A smart woman would have walked away then. She would have lit a match and set fire to the entire clusterfuck that was this situation. But I was never a smart woman, and if you didn't believe me, all you had to do was ask my mother.

A. Zavarelli

#33. One day, when my son was eight, he came into the kitchen while I was cooking and said: 'You put bad words in your books, don't you?' No doubt he had overheard my mother, who often tells people who ask about my work: 'Well, you'll never find her books in the Christian bookstore.'

Jill McCorkle

#34. The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: 'Never let a boy touch you down there.' I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.

Jeanette Winterson

#35. My father was an insurance man and a small-time gambler. He was a good man, but he had an eye for the racehorses, and I saw how it used to bother my mother. I've never gambled a dime. Never, in all those years in Vegas.

Don Rickles

#36. My mother would never let me in the kitchen. I always wanted to cook, but I was never allowed to. Her view of the world was, 'Cooking is my job, and studying is your job.' I think, in retrospect, she didn't like the chaos. She was very orderly. It had to be her way.

Ina Garten

#37. I feel sorry for people of good heart who have never had a chance to learn the realities of Native American everything - not just our history but the sweetness and the beauty and the reasons why were so close to Mother Earth.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

#38. I've had worse. (Draven)
Such as? (Simon)
The day my heart was ripped out of me. I assure you the king's executioner could never equal the pain I felt the day I saw our mother die. (Draven)

Kinley MacGregor

#39. Me I never had the chance to say,Well,I'm going to do something I want to do."I always did if for my family,for my children, for my father,for my mother."

Thomas Gambino

#40. Even with this disaster I had dragged us all into, she was still proud to be my mother. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments. I hoped that our resemblance extended beyond our blue eyes.

Piper Kerman

#41. I've always known, all my life, that I was going to be something special. I never knew what it was, but I always had that feeling. I think my mother installed it when I was a little guy.

Tommy Chong

#42. I was brought up by an Episcopalian father and Presbyterian mother in nondenominational Army chapels all over the world and never really had much religious experience.

Sally Quinn

#43. My father, Cecil Banks Mullis, and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker, grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad's family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things.

Kary Mullis

#44. Having a baby had always seemed the easiest and most natural thing to do, and I had never felt - even in my most furtive days of coming out - that being gay would mean I could not become a mother.

Kara Swisher

#45. My mother was a dominant force in our family. And I always saw her as the leader. And that was great for me as a young woman, because I never saw that women had to be dominated by men.

Dolores Huerta

#46. There never was a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and brave as a lioness ... The memory of my mother and her teachings were, after all, the only capital I had to start life with, and on that capital I have made my way.

Andrew Jackson

#47. Richer than I you can never be,
I had a mother who read to me.

Strickland Gillilan

#48. I would want to be a very present mother. You know, something that I never had.

Traci Lords

#49. For most of my adult life, I dreaded the day I woke up and saw my mother in the mirror. It never happened. But, I had grown into my father. I shouldn't have been surprised. Everyone always said I was the son he never had.

Jane Leavy

#50. My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

Steve Jobs

#51. My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

Kary Mullis

#52. I always thought I'd be the quintessential Earth Mother, but when I had Harrison, I really wasn't the natural mother that I always thought I would be. I adore children, but I was never that interested in newborn babies.

Jane Green

#53. My mother's rules had to do with feminine deportment, so I never played hard enough to break a toy or muddy my dress. My father's rules had to do with never shaming the family by even a hint of scandal, and not providing business rivals with an opportunity to kidnap me or throw acid in my face.

Bharati Mukherjee

#54. I was aware of it, but I grew up in a very a-religious family. My mother never went to church, she never had any religious training or background. It was never a part of our social interaction.

Donald Johanson

#55. My mother agreed to aid my abuse of alcohol but only if I promised never to tell my newly converted Mormon sister, whose identity I had stolen.

Chelsea Handler

#56. The only exception was my mother, who unabashedly took up for Adnan, fought with anyone who had anything negative to say about him, never stopped talking about him with Aunty Shamim, and prayed for him with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. I

Rabia Chaudry

#57. She'd never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she'd had one handy.

Junot Diaz

#58. I never had children, never even thought I would have children. Now I have 152 daughters; expecting 75 more next year. That is some type of gestation period.

Oprah Winfrey

#59. So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more, I saw at last its meaning and its place; Not the blind passion of the brooding past, But Mother
the World's Mother
come at last, To love as she had never loved before
To feed and guard and teach the human race.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#60. I was born 20 years after my eldest sister. I was the pampered child. That kind of love gives you an almost unbreakable backbone. My mother had three kids before me. She let me be completely free. I just never had anything to beat myself up over.

Christian Louboutin

#61. I'm terrible in the kitchen. I was mostly raised by my mother and she could cook, so I never perfected that skill. If I had to count on my own cooking to survive, I'd probably be thinner.

Ben Affleck

#62. I looked into her eyes, and saw my own staring back, the same peculiar shade, pale grey, flecked with yellow, rimmed with black. Now I knew the nature of her debt. It had weighed on her conscience for fourteen years. I was looking into the eyes of mother and I knew that I would never see her again.

Celia Rees

#63. Most of the kids that I meet in the street are serious hardened criminals that I meet in the street, never had a mother and a father to love them, to protect them, to teach them right from wrong and lead them out of crime and gangs and stuff like that.

Steven Seagal

#64. I looked at her, exhausted in the hospital bed, and she looked at you, and you looked at me looking at her with eyes that had never known anything else, and for a moment there I swear we saw each other with a clarity that nothing can alter, not time, not heartbreak, not death.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#65. But no turbulent emotions passed through me as he spoke, only a diluted version of the nauseating sensation that had taken hold the day in Bombay that I learned my mother was dying, a sensation that had dropped anchor in me and never fully left.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#66. I've never heard a person say, 'I had a rotten mother, but she's such a great physicist.

Sonia Manzano

#67. Both my mother and I were determined that we weren't going to stay on welfare. We always worked toward doing better, toward having a better life. We never had any doubts that we would.

Larry Ellison

#68. My mother had a sewing machine. I was never allowed to use it, but I was so fascinated by this little needle going up and down joining fabric together that I'd use it when my mother went out to feed the chickens.

Philip Treacy

#69. I had never written anything before in my life except maybe in high school when I wrote a short story, and my mother had to put an ending on that.

Nicole Jordan

#70. I had never heard that before; and so poor Rob Roy who was killed at that hunt was my brother! I did not wonder that my mother was so troubled. It seems that horses have no relations; at least they never know each other after they are sold.

Anna Sewell

#71. I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#72. I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you will trust God.

Mother Teresa

#73. Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different before, I don't remember.

Nancy E. Turner

#74. The two of you grew apart,' my mother would say. She made it sound as if we'd veered off in different directions, though in fact we had the exact same destination. I just never made it.

David Sedaris

#75. I'm eternally grateful to {our birth mother}, but wish I had never needed her. It's a loaded friendship, a complex connection.

Jana Wolff

#76. So old and persistent did Mother's unhappiness seem that I had never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is more acceptable than that which we are born into.

Hisham Matar

#77. Still what? I made my voice grating and sarcastic. I was never like so many Indian boys, who'd look down quiet in their anger and say nothing. My mother had taught me different.

Louise Erdrich

#78. I hadn't had a mother since I was two, and from then until seven I had believed God was someone who had run off with her and was living with her somewhere else ... (God took your mother, dear, because he needed her more than you do) which had never endeared him to me

Dick Francis

#79. I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!

Mother Jones

#80. I had such high expectations of myself. I was going to be the best mother, the best housewife, the best entertainer, the best nurse, you know - what it was, I was going to be the best. And I could never live up to my expectations.

Ann Richards

#81. My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.

Lauren Graham

#82. My mother was strong, in all the ways I was weak. She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you will never know.

Sarah Dessen

#83. I was raised by a strong mother and I never felt like I had to be a role, you know, I was just me, who I am.

Rickie Lee Jones

#84. I never felt like I had a mother.

Quincy Jones

#85. I was always the one leading the way in terms of wanting to do acting, singing and dancing. I was lucky that my mother had a very well-adjusted perspective of the world and never pressured me to do anything I didn't want to do.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

#86. I had never seen a woman's breasts before, and I doubted if any seven-year-old boy in Craighead County had. Maybe some kid had stumbled upon his mother, but I was certain no boy my age had never had this view.

John Grisham

#87. If your hair has never given you any trouble, if you've never had huge fights with your mother about it, then you might not have a story to tell. But I think most people do.

Elizabeth Benedict

#88. This is an old family secret, and I just found this out recently, and it almost broke my heart. My mother said to me, 'I had never told you this, but God, you were an ugly baby'.

John Stamos

#89. I was very much in my own world, never the popular kid. But I had a great family, a great brother and mother.

Jared Leto

#90. I was kind of a misfit, and when my mother died, I had to become an adult, something that I never thought I would ever be.

Martha Wainwright

#91. My mother gave me an Oscar de la Renta Gone with the Wind ballgown dress. I've never had a place to wear it out to because it's so old-fashioned fancy and beautiful, so I need to find a place to wear it but if I don't, I'll still keep it forever.

Elizabeth Jagger

#92. Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it.

Claire Tomalin

#93. My books rustled by like a military of ducks. My mother had never liked my books. She'd said they kept me from real life, by which I think she meant men, or money, or both. Always accusing things of precisely the crimes they hadn't committed.
(From the short story: Once an Empire)

Rivka Galchen

#94. Who thinks to interview their own mother? As a self-fixated teen, I never imagined that she had an actual personal history. To my young eyes, she was Source of Cash Obsessed With De-Cluttering

Jancee Dunn

#95. I am truly multi-racial. I never knew my biological father. I've always had less information than I would have liked to have had. All I know from my mother is that I have connections to many different cultures.

Vin Diesel

#96. In my mother's ferocious striving to give me 'everything,' she had never considered that giving me 'everything' would make me (1) different (from her), and (2) guilty (about what I got). Different and Guilty are not the stuff on which comradeship is built.

Betty Rollin

#97. My mother was a beauty queen in her hey day. That's where I learnt a little about makeup and hair ... I had never picked up or even seen a 'Vogue' before I was 17. I had no idea about fashion, magazines, models or designers. No idea.

Kylie Bax

#98. I had never been to a rodeo before. I had no idea how crazy white people could be. Considering I had been abandoned by a white, crack addict mother, I should have known.

Amy Harmon

#99. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments.

Piper Kerman

#100. I cried for the little girl who lost her father but never had a mother. I cried for the girl who only wanted to be accepted, but was never enough. I cried for the girl who suffered unfathomable pain at the hands of hate. I cried for the girl who deserved to be loved but didn't know how.

Rebecca Donovan