Anna Quindlen Quotes

Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

I went to bed feeling melancholy, wishing I could have poured out all my fears and insecurities to my mom. Wasn’t that what normal mothers and daughters did?

Our mythology tells us so much about fathers and sons. ... What do we know about mothers and daughters? ... Our power is so oblique, so hidden, so ethereal a matter, that we rarely struggle with our daughters over actual kingdoms or corporate shares. On the other hand, our attractiveness dries as theirs blooms, our journey shortens just as theirs begins. We too must be afraid and awed and amazed that we cannot live forever and that our replacements are eager for their turn, indifferent to our wishes, ready to leave us behind.

The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother--both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child's history is never finished.

I was the first son and first child. When my sister came along, well, she was two years younger, and I had to go to the golf course because my mother couldn't handle all the action going on. So I came with father to the golf course since I was a year and a half old and I spent the day with him here, and it worked in naturally. And it was fun for me being with my father, and doing things that a kid did it was great.

I saw what I had been fighting for: It was for me, a scared child, who had run away a long time ago to what I had imagined was a safer place. And hiding in this place, behind my invisible barriers, I knew what lay on the other side: Her side attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was finally there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in.

Another very interesting chapter is the education of children: the victims of problems of the family are the children. The children. Even of problems that neither husband nor wife have a say in. For example, the needs of a job. When the dad doesn't have free time to speak to his children, when the mother doesn't have time to speak with her children.

Fathers and mothers are too absorbed in business and housekeeping to study their children, and cherish that sweet and natural confidence which is a child's surest safeguard, and a parent's subtlest power.

For in those tacit understandings which maintain the bond of family union, the mother is really the mistress of her daughter only upon the condition of continually presenting herself to her as a model of wisdom and type of perfection.

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

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.

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

I think the relationship between mother and daughter is so interesting, even in a semi-normal family. Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke's family relationship is going to be so interesting to explore. It is going to give me so many places to go. Obviously, it has been said that she is not the most stable of characters. What is interesting about that, when you think about mental health, is that young women will often come into those problems and difficulties in their 20's, so it is very possible that this will start to affect her psyche.

I will never understand children. I never pretended to. I meet mothers all the time who make resolutions to themselves. 'I'm going to ... go out of my way to show them I am interested in them and what they do. I am going to understand my children.' These women end up making rag rugs, using blunt scissors.

If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.

We've never been in a time where mothers - parenthood, but particularly motherhood - is so fetishized. There's a whole industry around motherhood and mother-daughter bonds. And certainly when my mother was sick I found there was an incredible expectation for me to tell everybody how we were having this bonding experience and how healing it was.

It's easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child - at least till you try to get him to do something.

If the standard route for creating a family had worked for me, I wouldn't have met this child. I needed to know her. I needed to be her mother. She is, in every way my daughter.

A grown child is a dangerous thing.

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

While fathers are pleasant figureheads, there is a special bond between children and their mothers. 'Do you help your mother clean up the house?' I asked one girl of seven. 'No,' she sweetly replied, 'I help make the mess.' It's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.

People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.

Insults from an adolescent daughter are more painful, because they are seen as coming not from a child who lashes out impulsively,who has moments of intense anger and of negative feelings which are not integrated into that large body of responses, impressions and emotions we call 'our feelings for someone,' but instead they are coming from someone who is seen to know what she does.

Your mother calls and says she hasn't seen you for a long time. The first year: You invite her for a week. You give her your room, and you both sleep on the lumpy studio couch. The fifth year: Your mother sleeps on the lumpy studio couch. The tenth year: You send the children to mother.

When a mother, as fond mothers will; vows that she knows every thought in her daughter's heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much.