Mother-Daughter Relationships Quotes

At 13, I was wearing plain t-shirts. Then I used to steal my mom's clothing. She had all these crushed-velvet shirts with French-cut sleeves. And, like, seersucker bell-bottoms.

There's not one woman in America who does not care about her hair, but we give it way too much value. We deprive ourselves of things, we use it to destroy each other, we'll look at a child and judge a mother and her sense of motherhood by the way the child's hair looks. I am not going to traumatize my child about her hair. I want her to love her hair.

How deep is our desire to do better than our mothers--to bring daughters into adulthood strong and fierce yet loving and gentle, adventurous and competitive but still nurturing and friendly, sweet yet sharp. We know as working women that we can't quite have it all, but that hasn't stopped us from wanting it all for them.

Most of us don't have mothers who blazed a trail for us--at least, not all the way. Coming of age before or during the inception of the women's movement, whether as working parents or homemakers, whether married or divorced, our mothers faced conundrums--what should they be? how should they act?--that became our uncertainties.

[On her troubled relationships with her daughters:] You can acquire enemies. Why give birth to them?

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

She wondered if it was her stupid mother, the goddess of love, messing with her thoughts. If Piper started getting urges to read fashion magazines, she was going to have to find Aphrodite and smack her.

I always tell people, if a young girl read "Beloved" as her first novel, she'd have to kill either herself or her mother, because in "Beloved" you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand.

It's a wonder that any mother ever called a daughter Dinah again. But some did. Maybe you guessed that there was more to me than the voiceless cipher in the text. Maybe you heard it in the music of my name: the first vowel high and clear, as when a mother calls to her child at dusk; the second sound soft, for whispering secrets on pillows. Dee-nah.

If you want to understand any woman, you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully.

I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.

When I was a teenager, for the most part, I had a really great, easy relationship with my mom, but there are those occasional mom/daughter things that are unavoidable. That's what makes it more upsetting and more true to life. We have great moments, and then we have terrible moments as well.

I remember being seven and asking my mom if I was as pretty as Monique [my best friend in grade school]. And with all the love in the world, my mom looked at me and said, 'Oh, honey, you're so funny.' So, she doesn't lie to me...she answers the question by not answering and instead tells me what she thinks is my greatest strength.

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

There was a certain power beautiful mothers held over their less beautiful daughters.

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. It kills girls inside when they think they're letting their mothers down.

It's not always easy being her daughter.' I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are.

I think we spend a lot of time denying our mothers. We understand other women earlier than we understand our mothers because we're trying so hard to say, "I'm not going to be like my mother" that we blame her for her condition. If we didn't blame her for her condition, we would have to admit that it could happen to us, too. I spent a long time doing that, thinking that my mother's problems were uniquely her fault.

[Wishing her mother had named her Beulah:] At least you did not sit on your beulah.

A lot of times, when mother-son or mother-daughter relationships have been put on screen, they tend to trickle towards ugly, and I don't find that totally realistic for the wide swath of us, and it's also not that fun to watch.

In college, when a girlfriend asks you to watch a film in black and white, you do it. That's when I discovered a lot of films. I was really obsessed with Bergman, the whole world he creates. One that I always quote a lot is 'Autumn Sonata.' When you see women go through issues with their mom, you realize how right and poignant Bergman was.

Aren't most of us dealing with the fact that we have moms who either weren't ready to be moms or had some level of resentment about it? Everybody is dealing with the different iteration of pain their mom has handed them.