Top 100 Not A Mother Quotes
#1. He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business.
Kate Chopin
#2. And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, than I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt, which disappears when you cook with it. I am salt. Without my children, I cease to exist.
Thrity Umrigar
#3. She was a mother. One who is mother only to her own children is not a mother; she is only a woman who has borne children. But here was one of God's mothers.
George MacDonald
#4. Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.
Erma Bombeck
#5. It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.
Hilary Mantel
#6. When I feel like I'm stuck, I do something - not like I'm Mother Teresa or anything, but there's someone that's forgotten about in your life, all the time. Someone that could use an 'Attaboy' or a 'How you doin' out there.
Bill Murray
#7. My mother told me once that she and my father agreed that I would not be brought up Jewish in Chicago. She had me going to a Methodist church.
Wesley Clark
#8. I've known a lot of religious people. My mother is very religious, but she also is very private about it. When I was growing up, she never went to church. She just prayed and read her Bible and kept it to herself. I'm not from a background of flamboyant believers. It's much more a personal issue.
Michael Shannon
#9. I had a very, very difficult relationship with my mother, who was supremely self-centred. She was hilariously self-centred. She did not really take interest in anything that didn't immediately affect her.
John Cleese
#10. It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.
Colum McCann
#11. When the Earth was just a child,
He searched for his mother Venus;
And for his father Mars,
But they were not home;
They were gone elsewhere,
Out there, in the great expanse;
Beyond the breathing universe.
Stephan Attia
#12. The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.
Amar Bose
#13. I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love.
Raquel Welch
#14. My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother's sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely.
Barry Hannah
#15. As a child, I never heard one woman say to me, "I love my body". Not my mother, my elder sister, my best friend. No one woman has ever said, "I am so proud of my body." So I make sure to say it to Mia , because a positive physical outlook has to start at an early age.
Kate Winslet
#16. There are certain characteristics that define a good chimp mother. She is patient, she is protective but she is not over-protective - that is really important. She is tolerant, but she can impose discipline. She is affectionate. She plays. And the most important of all: she is supportive.
Jane Goodall
#17. When I was a little girl, my mother tried to make me dance, but I did not like it then.
Carine Roitfeld
#18. I am not quite sure where home is right now. I do have places in London and Milan, and a house in Spain. I guess I would say home is where my mother is, and she lives in Spain.
Sarah Brightman
#19. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do; for I shall not have my best warrior resigned to the service of a man who is fatter than Buddha and duller than the edge of a learning sword.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#20. As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies
Arthur Schopenhauer
#21. I can't tell you what will happen over the next four years. But I can only stand here tonight, as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, an American, and make you this solemn commitment: This man will not fail. This man will not let us down. This man will lift up America!
Ann Romney
#22. Chip did not believe in having a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother would have died.
John Green
#23. Oh, when a mother meets on high The babe she lost in infancy, Hath she not then for pains and fears, The day of woe, the watchful night, For all her sorrow, all her tears, An over-payment of delight?
Robert Southey
#24. How not to miss those days when the sun was a happy companion that stayed to play all year round and kissed me a careless nut brown? When Mother caught the sweet rain in her well behind the house, and the air was so clear that the grass smelled green?
Rani Manicka
#25. never seen real darkness, not in the city, but how, if you stood peeing off the cabin porch on a moonless night, or took a walk through the woods where the treetops stitched out the stars, you could almost forget you were there, you felt invisible. Country dark, his mother called it.
Tom Franklin
#26. Everybody dies, and everybody loses people they love-everybody-and that is not an excuse for you to fucking die. I love you, and I need you to be my mother, and I need you to have a life. So get over yourself.
Cynthia Hand
#27. He was pitching to me before I could walk. He gave me wooden bat before my mother let me use scissors. He said I could make the major leagues one day if I had "a plan," and if I "stuck to the plan"
Of course, when you're that young, you nest in your parents' plans, not your own.
Mitch Albom
#28. They say that at the mountain pass he looked back at his kingdom, his beautiful kingdom, and wept, and his mother told him to weep like a woman for what he could not hold as a man.
Philippa Gregory
#29. You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.
Jeremy Hardy
#30. That is not a crack house. It is a house with a family with a father and a mother and three sons and a daughter.
Rob Ford
#31. My mother and I never got along, not even when I was a child.
Tamara Mellon
#32. You're stifling me brother! Can I not have a moment to myself? I swear it wouldn't surprise me to find you sitting atop me one day as I do my morning business in the privy, like some great mother hen!" Elf
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#33. Being a mother is about protecting your children from every conceivable thing that might cause them hurt, but it's also about trusting them to live the best way for them, the best way they can; and trusting that even when you are not there to hold their hand, they can succeed.
Rowan Coleman
#34. My sister and I didn't know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn't what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty. "Purse. Purse stolen," said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.
Alice Munro
#35. You can not have sex with a guy on a regular basis and not develop deeper feelings for him. It's impossible. Mother Nature didn't build women to be able to do things like that. We were designed to be monogamous and hold the family unit together.
Cat Johnson
#36. You're not enjoying yourself," Syl said. "You're starting to sound a lot like my mother." "Captivating?" Syl said. "Amazing, witty, meaningful?" "Repetitive." "Captivating?" Syl said. "Amazing, witty, meaningful?" "Very funny." "Says the man not laughing," she replied, folding her arms.
Brandon Sanderson
#37. On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against.
Ingmar Bergman
#38. Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.
Betty Rollin
#39. God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.
Geraldine Brooks
#40. I am sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening.
His mother put him to bed, and made some camomile tea; and she gave a dose of it to Peter!
'One table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time.'
But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.
Beatrix Potter
#41. My mother was a good mistress to her servants, taking care of them in their sicknesses, not sparing any cost she was able to bestow for their recovery.
Margaret Cavendish
#42. When I grew up, it was a time when women were just supposed to be cute and not have many opinions. My mother and her friends were quite different. They were all the most beautiful women you've ever seen, and they were very strong women.
Cher
#43. I hear laughter and someone asks if I need help, not in a nice way. I snarl, 'What I need is for your mother to have thought a little harder nine months before your birthday.
Maggie Stiefvater
#44. The mother of a trophy wife is not automatically a trophy mother-in-law.
John Grisham
#45. Gratefulness is not just saying "thank you." It's acting. It is being yourself. A mother is grateful, shows gratefulness by mothering, a scientist by doing science.
David Steindl-Rast
#46. Land monopoly is not only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies; it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly.
Winston Churchill
#47. You know what's worse than burying your own child? Not burying your own child.
John Hennessy
#48. Metaphors for God drawn from human experience can easily be literalized. While we are immediately aware that the personal God is not really a rock or a mother eagle, it is easy enough to imagine that God is really a king or a father.
Sandra Marie Schneiders
#49. I've got my mother's acceptance of things and my dad's drive - not such a bad combination.
Kiki Dee
#50. Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.
Salman Rushdie
#51. The unborn baby, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and should not be robbed of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy.
John Calvin
#52. If fathers are sometimes sulky at the appearance of the destined son-in-law, is it not a fact that mothers become sentimental and, as it were, love their own loves over again.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#53. I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
Dani Shapiro
#54. The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.
Edward Abbey
#55. Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.
Margaret Atwood
#56. Set a church clock wrong to fool the devil, my mother always told me. But in this case I suspect the devil is not fooled.
Not for a minute.
Joanne Harris
#57. Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother's Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.
Pearl S. Buck
#58. An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.
Joni Mitchell
#59. My mother says I must not pass
Too near the glass;
She is afraid that I will see
A little witch that looks like me;
With a red, red mouth to whisper low,
The very thing I should not know!
Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt
#60. My mother, for the last 20 years anyway, would not call herself a Marxist but a human rights activist.
Joely Richardson
#62. When I got out of high school, I wanted to be an actor but was getting a lot of rejections. I was getting rejected by life. My mother, God rest her soul, told me not to quit.
Don Rickles
#63. Many of the books I loved as a kid, that even my mother read as a child, are very slow going. Today's children are not as patient. The best example of this is 'The Secret Garden,' which I adored as a child.
Lois Lowry
#64. I remember my oldest son, Steve, saying to me once, 'I don't ever remember seeing you with an apron on.' And I thought, that's right, honey, you did not. That was his concept of what a mother should be.
Lauren Bacall
#65. 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
#66. In addition to suffering her husband's scathing portrayal of a shrewish wife and mother, Nana Victoria had to sit not more than two seats away from the transsexual wrestler!)
John Irving
#67. I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized that to many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image.
David Bowie
#68. The strongest shoulders are not the well-built shoulders of a weight lifter who carries iron dumbbells, but they are of a mother's weak shoulders which carry three children!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#69. The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.
George MacDonald
#70. My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'
Lupita Nyong'o
#71. By adopting, I was not a full-fledged mother in their eyes. I hadn't paid the price of pregnancy, hadn't earned the badge of labor or the award for delivery, and would forever be an outside --an associate member at best. I looked like the other women, but I felt like less of one.
Jana Wolff
#72. Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money ...
Sylvia Ashton-Warner
#73. I feel being an actress is probably not half as difficult as being a mother, and I do not know when I will be ready for that kind of a decision.
Freida Pinto
#74. Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him; and tho' he trip and fall, He shall not blind his soul with clay.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#75. My real mother is a survivor, very strong and respected by the people who know her, but our relationship is not easy - but then, it was never going to be.
Lemn Sissay
#76. To save a man and thereby to spare a father's agony and a mother's feelings is not to do a noble deed, it is but an act of humanity.
Alexandre Dumas
#77. I'm not the kind of person who needs to be a mother no matter what. Life brings you people. Maybe I'll nurture someone who's not my child, like a friend, or an actor I'm working with who needs some love.
Heather Graham
#78. Goats did have names for themselves, she well knew: there was 'goat who is my kid,' 'goat who is my mother,' 'goat who is herd leader,' and half a dozen other names not least of which was 'goat who is this goat.
Terry Pratchett
#79. I feel like a mother-queen-vampire-Dracula because I want to make more girls so I can have more friends and more girls to play with, you know? For a long time, it was really just me. There were other girls in the niche underground, but not on a world level.
RuPaul
#80. Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.
Karen Russell
#81. Take time to truly look deep into the eyes of an individual and that is were you will truly see the soul of a person, do not be quick to judge strictly on being labeled!
Nicole Hill
#82. Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation.
Philip Yancey
#83. Without death, life would have no boundaries and our days would not be so precious. My mother was a firm believer in the common sense of nature.
Bernadette Pajer
#84. I've never hit a woman in my life. Not even my own mother.
W.C. Fields
#85. My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don't do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.
Louise Bourgeois
#86. It is not that you give birth to a child that matters most. Rather, it is what you birth into them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#87. Consider your second attention as a spiritual perceiver. Consider how you use it. You may plead innocence. You're not doing anything wrong. Don't feel that you've sinned. You have done what you had to do to survive, as did your mother, as did your grandmother.
Frederick Lenz
#88. MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
Christopher Hitchens
#89. He'd say, "If my mother was here, I wouldn't be like this." We'd say, "Shut up boy, you're not in your mama's house no more." We said that a lot. As children, seven or eight years old, we know nothing about the world, just that we were not in mama's house no more.
Alephonsion Deng
#90. I argued that talking is a female trait and that I would do my best to keep it under control, but that I would never be able to break myself of the habit, since my mother talked as much as I did, if not more, and that there's not much you can do about inherited traits.
Anne Frank
#91. I took in a foster kid that I wanted to adopt in the state where I live, and I pay taxes, said to me, based on not your morality, not on how good you are as a mother, not on how much you've given to foster kids in Florida, based on the facts that you're in love with a woman, you can't keep her.
Rosie O'Donnell
#92. I'm a parent. I think we're responsible for the problems that young people have. I believe that. I don't blame them for any of it. I blame us for what we haven't done as mothers and fathers, not sticking together as a unit.
Denzel Washington
#93. They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.
Anne Roiphe
#94. His mother asked, "And when is a marriage successful?" He had the feeling she was about to provide the answer, the very answer that people the world over were searching for. And he was right. "When the wife loves the husband," Nadira told him. "Not just loves him, but is crazy about him! Only then.
Anat Talshir
#95. In a flashback, we hear Holly's mother summing up her life in a conversation with her husband, Wylie: "My life is one big mistake," she said. "No, it's not," he said. "It's a series of small mistakes.
Will Allison
#96. Being a mother is incredibly important. To the naysayers, I growl, do not diminish it by calling it a job.
Shonda Rhimes
#97. If he was going to be given news about his mother, it had to come not in bits and pieces, but as a comprehensive 'revelation.' It had to be, as it were, a vivid cosmic landscape, the full vast expanse of which could be seen in a split second.
Haruki Murakami
#98. Where, incidentally, a holiday meal was not being served. My mother worked as a waitress at Palmer's Supper
Larry Watson
#99. When I was born my mother was terribly disappointed. Not that she wanted a girl - she wanted a divorce.
Woody Allen
#100. There was something about him that had always rubbed her the wrong way. Before her mother's death, she [Shiara] could remember her saying that he was a nice enough young man, but not the one for her daughter.
J.C. Morrows
