The mother is only really the mistress of her daughter upon the condition of continually representing herself to her as a model of wisdom and type of perfection.

Alexander Dumas (in The Count of Monte Cristo)

If your baby is "beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time," you're the grandma."

Theresa Bloomingdale

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.

Kate Douglas Wiggin (in The Treasure Chest)

God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is important to the point of necessity when they are adolescents.

Phyllis McGinley

If men bore children, there would only be one born in each family.

Unknown

A mother's singing, however poor, is far better for her baby than the best of records.

AC Harwood

If I had my life to live over, instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished every moment of my chance in life to assist God in a miracle. I would have sat on my lawn with my children and not worried about the grass stains. When the kids kissed me impetuously, I would never have said, "Later. Now go get washed up for supper."

Erma Brombeck

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

Florida Scott Maxwell

What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.

Henry Ward Beecher

A mother (Ying Ying) during a visit to her daughter's and son-in-law's home:

All around this house I see the signs. My daughter looks but she does not see. This is a house that will break into pieces. It's not too late. All my pains, my regrets, I will gather them together. My daughter will hear me calling, even though I've said no words. She will climb the stairs to find me. She will be scared because at first her eyes will see nothing. She will feel in her heart this place where she hides her fears. She will know I am waiting like a tiger in the trees, now ready to leap out and cut her spirit loose.

Amy Tan "Joy Luck Club"

The art of living is to function in society without doing violence to one's own needs or to the needs of others. The art of mothering is to teach the art of living to children.

Elaine Heffner

By no amount of agile exercising of a wistful imagination could my mother have been called lenient. Generous she was: indulgent, never. Kind, yes; permissive never. In her world, people she accepted paddled their own canoes, pulled their own weight, put their own shoulders to their own plows and pushed like hell.

Maya Angelou

Perfect love sometimes does not come until grandchildren are born.

Welsh Proverb

My mother said, "If you become a soldier you'll be a general; if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope." Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Picasso

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

Peter De Vries

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

Dogen