David O. McKay Quotes

I never stop being a mother and I never stop being an artist. You understand? Which is probably why my kids are so creative, because it's not separated.

Of all the haunting moments of motherhood, few rank with hearing your own words come out of your daughter's mouth.

It's so hard to be a mother and to also want to practice your art.

If not for my mom, I wouldn't be a writer today. When I was a little girl, I rarely saw her without a book in her hand.

All I am is a writer and a mom.

My kids are my greatest piece of art.

I wanted my daughter to look up to me.

My ultimate goal is to live forever, but the only way to live forever is to create and you always want to be there for your kid.

I'd say I did a lot of what I did with songs like 'At My Best' was because of the influence of my daughter.

When I think of a legacy, I think of the legacy of being a mom.

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure so I went to medical school. But after practicing medicine for a few years, while raising two sons (with a husband who was also a doctor) I realized that combining medicine with motherhood was more of a challenge than I could handle. So I left medicine and stayed home. And that's when I once again picked up the pen and began to write.

My mother raised me to be a writer.

There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak?

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

What you leave in your children, is more important than what you leave to them

No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

Becoming a mother is the best thing that has ever happened to me, I am happy to once again be a part of National Adoption Day. We were matched with our daughter through the U.S. foster care system, and my goal is to share information about the more than 120,000 foster care children in this country who are waiting for a family.

You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made. Even after you eat it, it stays with you - always.

What will your children remember? We can change the world inside our own houses. Take the gift of this moment and make something beautiful of it. Few worthwhile experiences just happen; memories are made on purpose.

Men of great genius and large heart sow the seeds of a new degree of progress in the world, but they bear fruit only after many years.

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

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.

Someone once told me that when you give birth to a daughter, you've just met the person whose hand you'll be holding the day you die.

To be an artist is not about fame; it's about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn't really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can't be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever.

I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world.