Old Mother Quotes

#1. Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

Tom Shales

#2. Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.

Abigail Adams

#3. How old did you have to be to put one over on your mother, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? Or did you maybe have to wait until she got old and a little chicken-soupy in the head?

Stephen King

#4. 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

#5. Whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

D.H. Lawrence

#6. Men don't want to be confused by the facts when their minds are already made up. Women know the art of negotiation - just ask the mother of a four-year-old who refuses to eat his veggies or the parent of a teenager.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar

#7. When a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, so desperately wants a baby what she's looking for is the kind of unconditional love a child gives a mother and a mother gives a child.

Ellen Barkin

#8. I think once you're a mother, you kind of always see your kids as a baby anyway no matter how old they get.

Molly Ringwald

#9. No problem except old age ever vanquished my mother.

Miles Franklin

#10. We may be old, boys, but we're not dead."
"I will murder you if you ever, ever imply that my mother has sex ever again," Isaac mutters as he cringes.

Kristen Proby

#11. They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope.

Sebastian Barry

#12. That was how she said goodbye to the world. To the people she loved. She was going to leave this earth the same way her mother had. With all the grace of the old world. The old, dying world.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#13. When I was growing up, when I was 11 years old I was listening to The Mothers of Invention. You know, I mean I was a Frank Zappa fan in Arkansas.

Billy Bob Thornton

#14. They looked like scarecrows,' Slim said of his troops. 'But they looked like soldiers, too.' He also recalled the heart-rending sight of a four-year-old child in Imphal trying to spoon-feed her dead mother from a tin of evaporated milk.

Andrew Roberts

#15. Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.

Ilya Ehrenburg

#16. A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics.

Allison Pearson

#17. My father's love was always strong
My mother's glamour lives on and on.
Yet still inside I felt alone,
for reasons unknown to me.

Lana Del Rey

#18. There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

Cheryl Strayed

#19. A remark of my brother's apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: "Old age is nature's self-criticism.

Emil M. Cioran

#20. My mother saw a movie when she was 14 years old. I forget the name of the movie, but one of the lead characters was named Lark. She decided then she would name me and she stuck to it, and here I am.

Lark Voorhies

#21. This is old news, and stale," growled the Shavepate. "Your mother said the same of your father's kisses," Daario replied.

George R R Martin

#22. I've never really been serious about my villainy. I don't have a master plan. I suppose my philosophy is: Every villain has a mother. For every cold-blooded killer on your screen, there's a little old lady somewhere who calls him 'sonny.'

Anthony Zerbe

#23. I'm not even sure whether I'm missing my mother, or simply the old routine of my life: a life of school and playdates and rules that kept me safe; boundaries and borders; bath time and curfews.
A simple life.

Lauren Oliver

#24. A seafaring uncle had given it to her mother who in turn had bequeathed it to Marilla. It was an old-fashioned oval, containing a braid of her mother's hair, surrounded by a border of very fine amethysts.

L.M. Montgomery

#25. When my father was vigorous and lucid, (my mother) regarded medicine as her wily ally in a lifelong campaign to keep old age, sickness, and death at bay. Now ally and foe exchanged masks. Medicine looked more like the enemy, and death the friend. (p. 184)

Katy Butler

#26. A child's fingernails should never be cut in the first year. The mother must bite them off or he'll become a thief. But when they are first cut at a year old, they must be buried under an ash tree so that witches can't take them and cause the child harm. Lincoln

Karen Maitland

#27. My mother loved movies, and I loved movies like she loved movies. So I wanted to do that. I'd send away for movie magazines - the old thing of everybody wanting to be a star or whatever.

Anne Meara

#28. My mother, she smiles when I come around now. My daughter's eatin' decent meals and she's in private school. She's 4 years old. She started school. It's a beautiful thing.

Obie Trice

#29. The problem is that your daughter has given her heart to a 15-year-old boy, and a 15-year-old boy does not yet qualify as a human being.

Bill Cosby

#30. I mean, if somebody said to me, junior year of college, you can go anywhere, your old man's paying for it, I'd have been gone in a flash. But I had to work. Every summer my mother would say, 'Get that job and hold on to it until August 30.'

Chris Matthews

#31. I began ear training when I was about six months old. My mother was a concert pianist, and she started all of her children with music before they were a year old. Then she began to see that I had a musical gift.

Twyla Tharp

#32. When my father went back into the military in 1947 and was gone for 3-1/2 years, my mother was 24 years old with four kids in a town she didn't know that well with no military services available, no family services available through the military, and that was the norm.

Jim Webb

#33. No matter how old we become, we can still call them 'Holy Mother' and 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them.

Desmond Morris

#34. I am not me, I said to the ocean, to the old feet, to the face in the mirror. And it was true. In the dream, the reflection staring back at me was not my own. It was my mother's.

David Arnold

#35. Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them - dog and boy, mother and old man - would feel the same.

David Wroblewski

#36. When you're young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you're too young to understand, and when she's old you shield her because she's too old to understand - or to have any more understanding inflicted upon her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don't want to know.

Allison Pearson

#37. It's wonderful, his mother says, and I feel something old and familiar course through my blood. It fills
all four chambers of my heart, and I think maybe, just maybe, it's happiness.

Tara Altebrando

#38. 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

#39. My mother left me when I was 2 years old which is devestating to a child ...

Kellie Pickler

#40. I'm an actress. In this sense, my profession is less complex than that of a model. True, they're into beauty in Hollywood, and it is age-related, but you can't put a girl with hot lips and no wrinkles and say: 'That's the mother of a 14-year-old.'

Ayelet Zurer

#41. I used to like wolves; they always arrived so
Punctually in sheep's clothing at the mortuary
To be prepared for burial by my father who
Showered his wrath on my mother with blows
From his fists at night; this warrior, this Lord

Abigail George

#42. My grandfather died when I was 12, but I remember the sorrow of my mother. Even now, she's an old lady, but when she speaks about her father, she looks young. A love like that is undefeated, you know?

Claire Denis

#43. I am so accustomed to the young mom phenomenon, that when I saw the poster for The Proposal I wondered for a second if the proposal in the movie was Ryan Reynolds suggesting he send his mother, Sandra Bullock, to an old-age home.

Mindy Kaling

#44. My mother and I are more than best friends; we are partners in crime. After she and my father, Quincy Jones, separated when I was 10 years old, my sister, Kidada, who was 12, went to live with our dad, and I stayed with my mother.

Rashida Jones

#45. Your mother and I had a child because we wanted to share our love with someone, not because we wanted a nurse to take care of us in our old age.

Nicole Peeler

#46. As I pass it, I feel as if I saw a dear old mother, sweet in her weakness, trembling at the approach of her dissolution, but not appealing to me against the inevitable, rather endeavouring to reassure me by her patience, and pointing to a hopeful future.

Thomas Edward Brown

#47. now, I am doing penance for my selfishness. Who knew I'd see the world through the drain of an old sink and across the surface of a wooden chopping board? But here it is, and here I am. In my zeal to be a part of a grand adventure, I traded my mother's kitchen for this one." Sister

Adriana Trigiani

#48. No trains. No traffic noise. At night, my mother's old bedroom was so dark I couldn't tell if I'd shut my eyes or not.

Susan Fletcher

#49. I guess my first professional experience was when my church choir director told my mother that I had a gift with my voice and said that I should think about auditioning, at 11 years old, for the chorus of our regional opera company.

Sondra Radvanovsky

#50. When I was four years old, I kept telling my mother that the little boy in our house was stealing things.

Jodi Picoult

#51. I like to sing because my mother was a singer. She sang to me all the time, so I learned to love singing. I did have a career as little 10-year-old George Benson. I made my first record as a vocalist, but I've been playing guitar since I was 9.

George Benson

#52. After about fourth grade, I do remember borrowing my mother's old portable Olivetti and typing stories out on the back of photocopies of journal articles.

Ann Leckie

#53. Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother's waiting for something to happen.' [ ... ] I sat like that for about an hour, trying to think what would come next, and in my mind, the barefoot doll in her mother's old yellow nightgown sat and stared into space as well.

Sylvia Plath

#54. I'm a mother of a three-year-old, but when I started 'California,' my son wasn't even a twinkle in my eye. Because the book took as long as it did, I wrote it before I was pregnant, while I was pregnant, and as a new mother - so I enjoyed a diversity of experiences while creating this world.

Edan Lepucki

#55. It doesn't matter how old you get. A hug from your mother always helps.

Lilliana Anderson

#56. I am here, come closer," the old donkey said with her eyes. "I will mother you.

Katherine Dunn

#57. When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.

Octavia E. Butler

#58. We are all children of the Great Spirit, we all belong to Mother Earth. Our planet is in great trouble and if we keep carrying old grudges and do not work together, we will all die.

Chief Seattle

#59. No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

#60. My children love my mother, and I tell my children, that is not the same woman I grew up with ... That is an old woman trying to get into heaven now.

Bill Cosby

#61. I was so involved in my boy-rhythms that I never came to grips with the fact that I was a girl. I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, "You can't be outside wrestling without a T-shirt on." It was a trauma.

Patti Smith

#62. All mothers are rich when they love their children. There are no poor mothers, no ugly ones, no old ones. Their love is always the most beautiful of joys.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#63. I love writing in first person more than third. I have to basically suspend my own world. I don't exist. I'm just a conduit. So I can be eight years old. I can be the mother of a kid that you find out certain things I'm not going to say.

Terry McMillan

#64. I'm glad that as a 33-year-old working mother, I can still choose to wear a Hello Kitty T-shirt or stay up late scrolling through the Twitter feed of my junior-high crush.

Diablo Cody

#65. It's one thing for a courier service transport letters and documents from one city to another at a cost that only big business can afford; but it's another thing to take a letter from an Indian boy studying at the University of Ottawa to his mother in Old Crow.

Jean Chretien

#66. In April 1933, Willie's mother, Myrle, gave birth to him in a manger somewhere along the old highway between Waco & Dallas. There were angels in attendance that night. Some of them, no doubt, flying too close to the ground:

Kinky Friedman

#67. From a pretty early age, my mother realized that I was a little bit more gifted and talented than my own age group. So, she moved me over to play with the boys' travel soccer team when I was about 11 years old.

Abby Wambach

#68. From 1967 to '70, Nigeria fought a war - the Nigeria-Biafra war. And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old. We spent much of our time with my mother cooking. For the army - my father joined the army as a brigadier - the Biafran army. We were on the Biafran side.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

#69. My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#70. In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging.

Martin Jacques

#71. My mother said I was a star when I was about four years old. That's all I need.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers

#72. As James Lovelock writes, 'Mother Earth' is now an old lady in her sixties, no longer as resilient as she once was. With our conscious actions, we are now measurably shortening her lifespan.

Mark Lynas

#73. People say California is the leading state on these type of issues. I've called my sister today and I said - I have a 3-year-old nephew - "Do you spank?"And she says, "If it's necessary I will. But that's my decision. I'm the mother. Not you."

Sean Hannity

#74. For a period of 17 years - from the age of 9 until I was 25 years old - my mother never spent a day free from domestic difficulties.

Chiang Kai-shek

#75. I had an emerald ring that my mother gave me four or five years before she died. She wore it always, I wore it always, and I have given it to my daughter, and she wears it always. This ring belonged originally to my great, great grandfather. It's well over 150 years old.

Jennifer Johnston

#76. My mother's hands were sixty-four years old, weathered, beautiful. They were soft and hard and they held no duplicity of emotion. They didn't love and hate. They were not tender and violent. They never offered me the world and handed me hell. They were constant: I miss them purely.

Maggie MacKellar

#77. It was just that she wondered when, exactly, she had become so old. Perhaps it had happened when her mother died. Some kind of generational shift. The mantel being passed.

Katarina Bivald

#78. Mothers give us life, love, and the heartfelt inclination to cry 'I want my mommy' no matter how old we get.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#79. My mother taught me how to apply my own makeup at 13 years old, and the most important lesson I learned is to never touch my eyebrows and to cleanse, tone, and moisturize twice a day.

Emilia Clarke

#80. Love her as in childhood
Through feeble, old and grey.
For you'll never miss a mother's love
Till she's buried beneath the clay.

Frank McCourt

#81. I enjoy racing historic motorcars from the '50s and '60s. The seed of my interest was planted when I was about 12 years old and took over my mother's Morris Minor. I drove it around my father's farm. But my favorite car is still a McLaren F1, which I have had for 10 years.

Rowan Atkinson

#82. A sudden thought struck me. Wouldn't it be odd if my mother got old! ... It is only natural that when your children are big you must be older but somehow I had never thought of its happening to my mother... What a peculiar thing to think of in the bright sunshine of the afternoon!

Maureen Daly

#83. When I was four years old, my mother owned some tenements in the Bronx.

Cy Coleman

#84. My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

Alan Hovhaness

#85. What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.

Twyla Tharp

#86. Even as a 10-year-old, I remember trying to explain to my mother and stepfather how upset and frustrated a messy room made me. But they just couldn't grasp it. They wanted me to be playing with baseballs and frogs while I wanted to be scouring garage sales.

Nate Berkus

#87. That was the fun of acting, being a blank canvas you could transform into the character - Indian princess, 20s vamp, Mother Courage, Oxford don, 94-year-old wife.

Diana Quick

#88. Where once Kathryn had embraced a delicate child in the body of a young woman, now she received the tenderness of a mother's love from a spirit grown unimaginably old.

Kirsten Beyer

#89. Call me All-American, but I love Ham and Cheese sandwiches. And not just any old ham and cheese sandwich ... My mother's is the best. I've tried many times to make these sandwiches on my own, but it's never the same.

Andy Roddick

#90. I don't remember my mother. She died when I was one year old. My distracted and callous sensibility comes from the lack of that warmth and from my useless longing after kisses I don't remember.

Fernando Pessoa

#91. My mother has stories of leaving me in the bath as small kid, like a 3-year-old, and there being mirrors on the side, and her going to get a towel and coming back in, and me making faces at myself, like, 'Now I'm happy. Now I'm sad.'

Allison Tolman

#92. My mother ... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.

Jodi Picoult

#93. When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.

James Joyce

#94. That old Mrs. Bishop was lacking in the qualities that make a good mother. And saying it that way makes her sound a good deal better than she really was.

Irene Hunt

#95. No matter how old you are, you always want your mother's love and acceptance. I guess I'm hoping one day I'll get it back.

Hilary Grossman

#96. You better not brag, you're a hunky old hag, and that goes for your mother, too.

Steve Miller

#97. Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.

Judith Viorst

#98. I was called a bookish child. Mother sent me to a ballet teacher in Cincinnati when I was nine years old. I guess I was an awkward child and the family wanted me to be graceful. When I found out I liked to dance and people seemed to like to watch me, I was determined to go places.

Vera-Ellen

#99. I was nine months old the first time Mamaw saw my mother put Pepsi in my bottle.

J.D. Vance

#100. I was eleven years old, and I'd lost my mother, and my soul, and the Crucible gave me you.

Rainbow Rowell