Top 100 The Maternal Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder that can significantly alter the maternal and in utero environment, leading to complications. Optimizing
T. Murphy Goodwin
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Right now I'm still only 25 and I don't think the maternal bug has hit me yet.
Karrie Webb
#9. The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#10. Unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me.
Charlotte Bronte
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. For, however all other feelings may be withered in a woman's nature, there is always one bright smiling spot in the maternal breast, and that is where a dearly-beloved child is concerned.
Alexandre Dumas
#15. I am obsessed with my sisters. Being the oldest, I probably just have that in me. But I also think I am the youngest sometimes. We all have moments when we are the maternal one of the group.
Kourtney Kardashian
#16. I connect with kids easily. They bring out the maternal side in me.
Malaika Arora Khan
#17. If you believe in the maternal instinct and fail at mother love, you fail as a woman. It is a controlling idea that holds us in an iron grip.
Nancy Friday
#18. The notion that the maternal wish and the activity of mothering are instinctive or biologically predestined is baloney.
Betty Rollin
#19. Be patient, my friends; time rolls rapidly away; our longing has its end. The hour will strike, who knows how soon?- when the maternal lap of everlasting Love shall be opened to us, and the full peace of God breathe around us from the palmy summits of Eden.
Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher
#20. Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.
Octavio Paz
#21. I KNOW THAT I CAN'T SOLVE ALL THE MATERNAL HEALTH CHALLENGES IN THE WORLD BY MYSELF. I NEED AND WANT OTHERS TO JOIN ME.
Christy Turlington
#22. Babies did not attract me, and I was altogether without the maternal sense so highly developed in small and adolescent girls.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#23. People say that when a baby is crying the paternal grandmother will say, "The baby is crying, you should feed her," and the maternal grandmother will say, "Why is that baby crying so much, making her mom so tired?
Shin Kyung-sook
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. There's something about maternal love - it might just be the strongest human spiritual bond there is.
Guillermo Del Toro
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help ...
Edith Stein
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. Maternal health remains a staggering challenge, particularly in the developing world. Globally, a woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute.
Jessica Capshaw
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.
Gregory Maguire
#66. Just as there is no warning for childbirth, there is no preparation for the sight of a first child ... There should be a song for women to sing at this moment, or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name the moment.
Anita Diamant
#67. 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
#68. It's the ancient instinct: In times of great danger, be wary of strangers. Trust no one outside your circle. But there's another instinct, far older, as old as life itself, nearly impossible for the human mind to override: Protect the young at all costs. Preserve the future." - Vosch
Rick Yancey
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
#74. 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
#75. (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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time.
Karen Armstrong
#79. 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
#80. Got anything to eat?" I asked.
"You know where the gas station is," said my incredibly nurturing and maternal mother.
Susan Juby
#81. daughter?' 'She was a beautiful child.' Mrs Williams's eyes grew misty with the quasi-maternal feelings of a procuress.
Ross Macdonald
#82. What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.
Camille Paglia
#83. My maternal grandmother was the longest-lived of my grandparents. She migrated to Australia in her 80s and lived into her 90s. It was great that she got to be part of my adult life.
Nick Earls
#84. My maternal grandma was a tough, tough lady and a stern woman, who lost her husband young and raised six kids by herself. She lived in a mining community in Upstate New York and ran a boarding house for miners. She took care of an entire family and miners who lived in the house as well.
Steve Carell
#85. That's the thing about Chinese mothers: hidden behind their maternal expectations and critical diatribes are women who will fight to the death for you. As soon as I called her Mama, Li-Ming would be my strongest ally for the only months I knew her.
Kaitlin Solimine
#86. A Pakistani exchange student's maternal American host "managed to summon the transforming question of her culture, built on the revolutionary idea that people are the sovereign, the boss, captains of their own fate.
She said, simply, "But what do YOU think?
Ron Suskind
#87. Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally.
Judith Lewis Herman
#88. I know the well of my maternal incompetence is deep but I am determined to siphon up a calm and breathing hope for him.
Donna VanLiere
#89. We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.
Paul Farmer
#90. Why one enjoys maternal grandparents more than the paternal ones, i have never understood, but it was like that for me.
Aporva Kala
#91. I didn't know my grandparents. They were - my grandfather - my maternal grandfather died when I was five. I have very little memory of him. All my other grandparents were dead by the time I was of any age to remember anything.
Robert Barry
#92. The tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women's status.
Elisabeth Badinter
#93. Though auditing a class at the Sorbonne taught by Luce Irigaray and titled The Mother-Daughter Relationship: The Darkest of Dark Continents, Claire had followed maternal example by setting out guest towels.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#94. For millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy.
Esther Duflo
#95. Growing up in the Midwest, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, who, as a young widow running a small business in 1920s Kansas City, had known firsthand the old Pendergast regime and its classic combine of politics and organized crime.
Roger Morris
#96. I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.
Aravind Adiga
#97. The states are not free, under the guise of protecting maternal health or potential life, to intimidate women into continuing pregnancies.
Harry A. Blackmun
#98. There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman's attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, 'Ahhhh!'
Ralph Fiennes
#99. A few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#100. My mother always spoke to me in English, so it's technically my maternal language, and it became a kind of private language - I was happy that I could speak in English to my mum and the majority of people wouldn't understand it.
Lou Doillon
