Joshua Ferris Quotes

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

That's one thing I find about having children - it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who've had children.

[My favorite thing about motherhood is] that it's made me grow into a woman finally, and I finally grew up, thank God.

A lot of writing about being a mother is not so much writing about the kids themselves. They become placeholders for the shift that happens when you're suddenly in charge of other people.

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.

Becoming a mother doesn't always change every aspect of your personality.

I have become that mother I used to dread.

Obviously Victoria and Mel B have become mothers and there is a part of me that wants to be a mum.

Like lots of women who marry young and find themselves mothers by the time they're 25, I felt I no longer had an identity.

Pregnancy was probably the best and the hardest thing I'll ever go through. I know for a lot of women, it can be wonderful and relatively easy.

… men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this [childbirth] very often. God's will be done, and if He decrees that we are to have a great number of children, why we must try to bring them up as useful and exemplary members of society.

I feel like I grew up in such a big way in the past couple of years, in a way that I never thought I would. You can't be the enfant terrible when you have the enfant at home.

I guess if there is a big spiritual experience in my life, it is me becoming a mother.

I am the mother of five children.

I definitely want to be a mom.

I'm the mother of four.

Like most women, I always dreamed of becoming a mother.

I decided to have a life: to become - pardon the expression - a soccer mom.

Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.

Having a child as a single mother was a crucible - maybe this is true for all parents. I got rid of so much stuff that didn't really matter in the scheme of things-like throwing stuff out of an airplane that kept me flying too low. What was left was essential, i.e. not a lot of extraneous stuff that had kept me busy and people-pleasing. I just didn't have the luxury of wasting my life force on so much stupidity and distraction. That made me strong.

One thing I have is that I have never been afraid to expose myself in a way, and I really think I got that from my mother. That's a great gift you can give to a child, that they have confidence in their abilities.

But children, hark! Your mother would rather, When you arrived, have been your father.

I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.

I really felt the growth of myself as a human being, as a person [becoming a mother].

There's such a grace and understanding in the female persona when women have really come into their own. Part of that is to have children, and to be caring for those children, and not only in the care for them, but also in the nurturing and raising of them, they have to pass on their souls and their intelligence. And all those things can't be taught. It's something that, that in the essence of a woman, the essence of a mother, a mother knows!