When Mother Died Quotes

#1. But when mother died, Caroline was twelve, and in that queer time between childhood and nubile girlhood, when some girls seem to be wise without experience, and perhaps more clear-headed then they will be again until after their menopause.

Robertson Davies

#2. When Mother died I was both freed and abandoned, as are we all at this profound juncture in our lives.

Rita Mae Brown

#3. Well, my mother, I knew until I was 13. She died when I was 13.

Harry Connick Jr.

#4. 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

#5. I held my father's hand while he died of cancer, and it's really painful when you do something like that up close and personal. My mother was already gone, and I was very, very close to my father.

Elizabeth Warren

#6. I guess the most seminal moment going early way back was my father died when I was 3 years old. I was raised by my grandparents, and my mother went back and got a degree.

Ram Shriram

#7. It wasn't fair. I wanted to take her to friend court. I wanted to sue her. But I could see the faces of the jury when it was revealed that her mother had just died. Died.

Leila Howland

#8. When I was a child I had a best friend who lived across the road from me. When her mother died unexpectedly it was like losing a member of my own family. I think I am still affected by the memory of that loss.

Margaret Mahy

#9. I guess I can be surprised I'm alive. I'm taking a little better care of myself than when I was a young person. My father died when he was 63. My mother made it to 74. My grandparents, God, they were dropping like flies.

Loudon Wainwright III

#10. Angelina said, "Mom. I don't want you to die. That's the whole thing. You took from me the ability to care for you in your old age, and I wanted to be with you when you died, when you die. Mom. I wanted that.

Elizabeth Strout

#11. When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

William Blake

#12. I grew up in a very open-minded family. My father died when I was very little, so my mother was really, really incredibly busy trying to provide for us.

Sonia Braga

#13. My mother did play classical piano, not that well. And actually, my father sang with the big bands - he sang with Bob Crosby's band - but he had to give up show business when his father died. He had to come back to Montgomery and take over the furniture store.

Toni Tennille

#14. She was ten when our mother died, Jenny

Diana Gabaldon

#15. I think when my mother died, it was such a - you know, a shock to the logic that I had been raised with.

Jim Gaffigan

#16. I'm destiny's child. I wasn't meant to be born: my mother bled for four months when she was pregnant, and then she fell down the stairs in her eighth month of pregnancy. She nearly died; I believe I came into this world for a reason.

Shilpa Shetty

#17. For example, when my mother died, the people who showed up just to put an apron on to cook, people who really do the right thing, so to speak, as my momma would always say to show that they care, a sense of community that we've lost so much in our country.

Sela Ward

#18. When my mother died, and when my father died, it's big. Our parents are giants; they're titans of our lives, so of course it's going to be a big deal.

Loudon Wainwright III

#19. I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.

Kate Atkinson

#20. I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

Marina Abramovic

#21. My father's life was so decimated by his earliest experiences. His mother died when he was 7 years old, which he always said was the worst experience in his life. When he was 8, his father disappeared and he was on his own from the age of 8.

Walter Mosley

#22. My mother died when I was 17, and I moved in with my dad to make a 12-month pig's ear of retaking my A-levels.

Robert Webb

#23. My father died when I was young, and after he did, my mother had it tough. Very tough.

Cate Blanchett

#24. My mother was real and her son was real. When he died she buried him. Now she is dead. Mother Courage and her children, my mother and her son. They are all stories now.

Patti Smith

#25. Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair of nineteenth-century adventurers, a riverboat gambler, say, and his alibi girl.

John Banville

#26. My father was unwell when I was 11, had a stroke at 14 and died when I was 18. My mother going to work at seven in the morning and coming back to look after him and me and my brother left its mark on me.

John Caudwell

#27. When my mother died and left me all alone, I began to realize that some things, like being loved, were more important than one's image, money, and accomplishments.

J. Matthew Nespoli

#28. I remember when I was 26. My father died when I was young and my mother didn't have a lot of money, so I thought, 'I want to own a flat by the time I'm 26.' So I worked towards that, literally trying to scrimp and save. But sometimes those plans don't go as you expect.

Cate Blanchett

#29. My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.

Alan Furst

#30. REX BRADEN AWOKE before dawn, just as he had every Sunday morning for the past twenty-six years - since the Sunday after his mother died, when he was eight years old. He didn't know what had startled him

Melissa Foster

#31. But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

Meghan O'Rourke

#32. My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess - she died when I was nine and a half, but if she had lived, I probably wouldn't be trying to play guitar. She wanted me to be known, but as something else. Not a guitar player.

B.B. King

#33. When my mother passed away several years ago - well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn't 'pass away.' She died. Something about that verb, 'to pass away' always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother did not pass away. She definitely died.

Steve Allen

#34. 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

#35. When my mother died, I thought I'd drown in sorrow. But my grandmother said something very wise, and I've always held it close to my heart. She said that not even the sea is infinite, and neither is grief.

T. Frohock

#36. If I'd seen a grown man beating a crippled boy, of course I'd intervene. If my father died and left my mother destitute, it's your instinct to take care of her. So when I started to think about it in those terms, it started to make sense to me.

Charlie Hunnam

#37. My mother died when I was young, and I was filming all the time. I was all over the place. Acting was the one constant.

Mara Wilson

#38. When I was 14, my mother died. My father, who had always had ulcers, came apart. He had a series of intestinal operations, and was in the hospital for nearly a year. So the four of us teenagers lived by ourselves in the apartment without a guardian.

Bonnie Bedelia

#39. Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.

Edith Sitwell

#40. That wonderful, terrible night when her mother died and her whole world had been destroyed, when she realized she loved Kai and her whole world had been created anew.

Diana Peterfreund

#41. When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

Joyce Carol Oates

#42. I met Gemma, my wife, when she was 12. She had a schoolgirl crush on me and her dad had arranged for her to meet me. Later, she started coming to my concerts, but I only got to know her well after her mother died. I rang to see how she was, and that's how it started.

Gary Numan

#43. My mother was gentle and warm. She was the sort of person you could really open up to. I was the eldest and her only boy, so I guess I was treated differently. She did bring me up as a Catholic, and at one time I was an altar boy, but I lost my faith, as did my father, when my mother died at 45.

Stephen Mangan

#44. I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.

Walter Dean Myers

#45. 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

#46. One of the few times I saw my mother cry was when Lennon died, and the other time was when Elvis died.

Sam Taylor-Wood

#47. My grandmother died when my mother was just 11 years old, and consequently, my mother never learned how to cook particularly well.

Jami Attenberg

#48. My own mother died when I was 10 years old. My folks have told me that what little humor I have comes from her. I can't remember her humor, but I can remember her love and understanding of me.

Will Rogers

#49. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return,

George Orwell

#50. And did the biblical Lazarus have a mother? What did she do when he was resurrected? Did he bid her good-bye before he returned to his undeath? Was he the same son to her undead as he was alive? I read that he sailed to Marseilles with his sisters afterward, where he may or may not have died again.

Aleksandar Hemon

#51. My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy.

Pat Conroy

#52. My mother Molly had a nervous breakdown after my father Chic died, aged 50. He was a very generous man who ran a shop in Dundee giving a lot of people tick. When he died, a lot of people hadn't paid their bills, so he died with a lot of debt. After he died, my mother went doolally.

Brian Cox

#53. When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.

Amy Hempel

#54. Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

Anne Lamott

#55. I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.

Anne Lamott

#56. I just find it interesting that kids apparently used to cry when Bambi's mother died. George and I both held our breaths, and then cheered when she didn't reanimate and try to eat her son.

Mira Grant

#57. When I decided to become a doctor, I was very, very young, when my mother, her seventh child, became pregnant, and she was feeling terrible pain, and I could not know how to help her. And my mother died in front of my eyes, without knowing why, which diagnosis. So I decided to be a doctor.

Hawa Abdi

#58. When my mother died, I had to go on air that night and do jokes.

Graham Kennedy

#59. When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

#60. From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell

#61. My childhood was kind of complicated. I have an older sister, but my father, my mother's husband, died when I was four years old. So I only had my mum and sister, really.

Orlando Bloom

#62. How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby , who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895 - now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago - when my mother died.

Virginia Woolf

#63. As I sat there in the pew during the altar call, I suddenly understood that if I didn't surrender to Him I would go to Hell when I died. It wasn't Hell itself that scared me - or not just Hell. It was the idea that my mother was going to Heaven without me.

Daryl Gregory

#64. My mother died when I was five, and all I did was sit and cry. I cried and cried and cried all day, until the neighbors went away.

Madonna Ciccone

#65. I grew up in a house full of faith, and my mother died when I was a little girl, and I found comfort in my faith.

Roma Downey

#66. He hated him for the twenty-three year old his mother had been, younger than he now was when she'd died, alone and sorrowful.

Sarah J. Maas

#67. When my daughter Paula died, I was in the deepest pain, and my mother said, "This kind of sorrow is like a long, narrow, dark channel. You have to walk this channel alone and be sure that there is light at the other ending. Just keep walking."

Isabel Allende

#68. Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.

Naomi Shihab Nye

#69. The lift of her heart she'd felt on the outcrop she now felt again, and it wasn't just love. She'd felt love before, known its depths when her mother died.
This was something rarer. Happiness, Laurel thought, that must be what this is.

Ron Rash

#70. My mother was a talker, but there are still so many things I want to ask her. She died when I was forty. But she did teach me to be a talker with my own children.

Susan Shreve

#71. I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

Joan Lingard

#72. [On her mother, who died when Hutton was 4:] I hardly remember her, but I have missed her all my life.

Barbara Hutton

#73. I had one request when I started doing the plays. My prayer was: God let me do well enough to be able to take care of my mother. I was able to do that 'til the day she died because of my audience. So, they've already done enough. All I ask for now is their continued support.

Tyler Perry

#74. My mum died when I was 14. That is a kind of strange age to lose a mother. John lost his mum when he was 17.

Paul McCartney

#75. Our father died when we were very young, so our mother raised six kids. We saw the world filtered through her eyes, being a minority woman raising six kids.

Gilbert Hernandez

#76. I feel you. Inside. In the parts of me I crushed the night my mother died. No matter how I tried to keep you out, you got in and I couldn't let you leave me behind. So listen to me when I say this. My life is yours. You're the reason I'll stay alive. The only goddamn reason.

Dee Tenorio

#77. My father died when I was seven, leaving a widow and five sons, ranging in age from five to seventeen. My mother was the most highly-disciplined and hardest working person I have ever known, and this, combined with her love and gentleness, enabled her to make a success of each of her children.

Arthur Lewis

#78. It's really sort of morbid, but she said her mother wanted to see me all her life. And when she died, she made just one request: that a picture of me be put into her casket. So somewhere in England, I'm in a casket.

Hank Snow

#79. I grew up in a second when my mother died," he told Sunil. "My father and brother didn't understand me.

Katherine Boo

#80. Everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.

Jerome K. Jerome

#81. I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.

Dani Shapiro

#82. I, of course, owe everything to my mother, because my father died when I was only nine days of age; and the marvelous teachings, the faith, the integrity of my mother have been an inspiration to me.

Heber J. Grant

#83. Never having been in love, this is going to be a real trick. I think of my parents. The way my father never failed to bring her gifts from the woods. The way my mother's face would light up at the sound of his boots at the door. The way she almost stopped living when he died.

Suzanne Collins

#84. When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America.

Louise Bourgeois

#85. When someone you love has died, there is a certain grace period during which you can get away with murder. Not literal murder, but pretty much anything else.

Daisy Whitney

#86. Lorna was quite young when her mother died, and I think she's blocked out some of the memories. I talked to her a little bit about that, but I wasn't prepared to go around and poke and hurt her.

Judy Davis

#87. After my father died, I learned that when tragedy strikes, you can either open up or shut down. My mother opened up and was not herself for some time. I shut down, and it worked for me. I shut down again on the day of September the eleventh.

H M Naqvi

#88. When my father died, my mother was still alive. And I think when your second parent dies, there is that shock: 'Oh man, I'm an orphan.' There's also this relief: It's done; it's finished; it's over.

Roz Chast

#89. You're just the special one. He loved your mother. She was his world and when she died you became his world. That's just the way it is, and I'm damn happy he gives a shit when it comes to you, Mase told her.

Abbi Glines

#90. The two saddest moments of my life were when my mother died and when I was told I couldn't play football for the Colts anymore.

Art Donovan

#91. My father came by himself across the North Korean border when he was seventeen. And hasn't seen his brothers or sisters or parents since then. And he died some time ago, but never saw any of his relatives. My mother was a refugee in war-torn Korea.

Jim Yong Kim

#92. My mother's cross was given to me when she died. I like to have it always close to me.

Christian Louboutin

#93. I had a sister who died and my mother passed away. I know that grief comes in waves. When deep grief hits, I know that it hurts like hell, and then you get a little bit of a respite, and then it comes back, and it hurts like hell. I know it can be survived.

Emily Saliers

#94. After my father died when I was seven and my mother entered into an abusive relationship, I shuffled between houses - staying with friends, families from church, and relying on the kindness of teachers and people throughout my community to help me grow up essentially without parents.

Ronnie Musgrove

#95. I'm starting to get older, and began to think about mortality a little more. My mother died in 2003 and that was a big shock. When your parents start to die off, that's going to be a revelation. So for me, this album - although it might sound quite cheery - is really talking about death.

Donald Fagen

#96. My mother desperately wanted children. She had a child that was stillborn - something I learned when I was looking through her 'effects' after she had died. It was then that I discovered my original birth certificate, which indicated the previous birth.

Stanley Hauerwas

#97. My mother had me when she was 15. My father died before I was born. So my mother was a teenage widow, and she used herself as her greatest example so I wouldn't end up in her position.

Gabriel Luna

#98. Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

Anne Rice

#99. My mother died when I was 12, and right after, my dad died in a car crash. I was 15 and had no family. The court sent me to live with my uncle and aunt in Missouri.

Karolyn Grimes

#100. 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