Maggie Smith Quotes

I have four daughters, the eldest is 19, the youngest is 12, and I watched all of them journey into motherhood. Motherhood is very deep. It starts when you're very, very young. Now, my 12 year old comes in, wants to put me to bed. And she'll, you know, put her hand on my forehead and say the prayer with me. As for years I've done for her! It's almost like a very beautiful, natural transition.

Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.

I keep seeing myself in my daughter, and I see my mother in me and in her. Bloody hell.

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.

As everyone, you do end up becoming your mother, but also as you're acting, I find out you become every member of your family, bits come out without you really wanting them to come out.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

Whenever I write about motherhood - and I write about it a lot - I am drawing on my experiences as a mother and also my experiences as a daughter.

It's strange because you - your life goes so swiftly. You look up one day you're a teenager, the next day you're a grandfather and you want to decide, 'I sure hope my kids don't make the same mistakes.'

My daughter teases me once in a while saying, Remember when you used to be my mother and you had black hair?

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

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

I know I've got a lot of my mother in me.

I'm not made to be a mother.

I think a mother needs to be with mothers. I don't know what they talk about.

My adoptive mother always wanted to meet my biological mother.

I am a reflection of my mother.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

There's innate competition, I think, between mothers and daughters - mine no more so than anyone else.

Becoming a grandmother is wonderful. One moment you're just a mother. The next you are all-wise and prehistoric.

We [work] really hard to make sure we accomplish everything we want in life, but we don't think about being the president's daughter; we don't think about that, really.

Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

I am my father's daughter. It was not up to me growing up. I was his hunting and fishing buddy, so I've been shooting my whole life.

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.