Helen Rowland Quotes

Fathers be good to your daughters, daughters will love like you do. Girls become lovers, who turn into mothers, so mothers be good to your daughters, too.

Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.

A child's first teacher is its mother.

I think there's a tremendous amount of guilt that goes on between mothers and daughters, no matter how good or bad their relationships are.

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

It is true that all mothers do things differently from their own mothers, but they don't necessarily do them better.

In all the universe, your mother is the only thing that truly scares me, especially where you’re concerned. I don’t ever want to be on her dark side. (Adron) Ha ha. And need I remind you my mother wasn’t the one screaming at the pool when you got shoved in. (Devyn) Yeah, all right, so we both have screwed-up, irrational mothers. (Adron)

Men often marry their mothers.

They say our mothers really know how to push our buttons - because they installed them

You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair.

And in the same way, FDR's not much of a father. Although the children in all their memoirs really talk about what a fun-loving guy Dad was, and how brooding and unhappy Mom was. The children sort of blame it all on the mother. Well, this is kind of standard and typical, and aggrieved Eleanor Roosevelt that she was not a happier mother. She wanted to be a happier mother. And I must say, she was a happier grandmother.

Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

Even after the age of 50 it was impossible for me to see my mother as a human being. I felt she was a monster, and she had subtly been influencing my behavior and my thoughts and my dreams for so long that she was kind of a monster; she was a demon. And when I brought her back to life, I could feel that malevolent presence around me again, that woman who was totally incapable of giving nurturing to anybody, and, you know, her selfishness and her withdrawn indifference to everything but her own needs.

How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.

This tug-of-war often obscures what's also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of tribe, a run at happiness. You can't imagine how seriously I take that - even as I fail you. Mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done.

The mother is the early care giver and primary source of identification for all children.... A daughter continues to identify with the mother

My children love my mother, and I tell my children, that is not the same woman I grew up with...That is an old woman trying to get into heaven now.

My daughter is a fan of mine but she doesn't want to be too obvious about it because I'm her mum and it's not cool.

Wise children always choose a mother who was a shocking flirt in her maiden days, and so had several offers before she accepted their fortunate papa.

A light-heel'd mother makes a heavy-heel'd daughter.

Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother, so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. I wasn't as close to her then as I nowadays, in retrospect, wish I had been.

Women are aristocrats, and it is always the mother who makes us feel that we belong to the better sort.

My mother is home. Your mother is your home. Everybody is a momma's boy or a momma's girl. That's where we came from, from a woman's womb.