To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.

—Maya Angelou



Never say anything on the phone that you wouldn't want your mother to hear at your trial.

—Sydney Biddle Barrows



Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

—James Joyce



Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's secret hope outlives them all.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes (1775-1817)



A mother's hardest to forgive.

Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,

Ripe on a plate. And while you live,

Relentlessly she understands you.

—Phyllis McGinley



Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don't mean a thing.

—Toni Morrison



The best academy, a mother's knee.

—James Russell Lowell



My mother loved children—she would have given anything if I had been one.

—Groucho Marx



All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

—Oscar Wilde



I really learned it all from mothers.

—Dr. Benjamin Spock



A mother is a mother still,

The holiest thing alive.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge



A boy's best friend is his mother.

—Joseph Stefano (from the Psycho screen play)



The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.

—William Ross Wallace



Good wombs have borne bad sons.

—William Shakespeare



An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

—Spanish Proverb



Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.

—Meryl Streep



A mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.

—Emily Dickinson



There is nothing like a mama-hug.

—Adabella Radici



God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers.

—Jewish Proverb



Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.

—Oprah Winfrey