"My mother is a big believer in being responsible for your own happiness. She always talked about finding joy in small moments and insisted that we stop and take in the beauty of an ordinary day. When I stop the car to make my kids really see a sunset, I hear my mother's voice and smile."
"My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It's just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she's the daughter of alcoholics who'd leave her alone at Christmas time."
"I grew up in one of the most socially conservative neighborhoods in Ohio, and my parents were traditional Catholics. But in her old age, my mother got her home health care from a guy who was gay, who was wonderful to her. Before she died, she rode a float in the Cincinnati Gay Pride Parade."
"My mother taught me something at a young age - she said 'you are the company you keep'. To define yourself by some label or some level of resources - that's pretty shallow."
"When you're a stay-at-home mother you have to pretend it's really boring, but it's not. It's enriching and fulfilling, and an amazing experience. And then when you're a working mother you have to pretend that you feel guilty all day long."
"I couldn't even go to the bathroom alone. My mother or a social worker always went with me."
"I absolutely love being a mother. It's been a blessing. It's fun and it's hard, but it's absolutely amazing."
"I'm ultimately a widow and a single mother, who's not even getting to be a mother right now. I am so alone, it's freaky."
"Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature."
"I was born by myself but carry the spirit and blood of my father, mother and my ancestors. So I am really never alone. My identity is through that line."
"My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely."
"The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny."
"I have led an unusual life. I have buried a father killed at age 50 and two brothers killed in the prime of their lives. I raised my children as a single mother when my husband was arrested and held for eight years without a conviction - a hostage to my political career."
"I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging."
"In truth, I am a single mother. But I don't feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends."
"My family, frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead."
"The mother is everything - she is our consolation in sorrow, our hope in misery, and our strength in weakness. She is the source of love, mercy, sympathy, and forgiveness. He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly."
"Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms."
"Memory is the mother of all wisdom."
"It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder."
"My mother was against me being an actress - until I introduced her to Frank Sinatra."
"I don't have a bank account because I don't know my mother's maiden name."
"Don't forget Mother's Day. Or as they call it in Beverly Hills, Dad's Third Wife Day."
"They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse."
"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's."
"No man is responsible for his father. That was entirely his mother's affair."
"I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity."
"My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her."
"My mother always called me an ugly weed, so I never was aware of anything until I was older. Plain girls should have someone telling them they are beautiful. Sometimes this works miracles."