“It may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was ninety-two does not diminish—it only magnifies—the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut.”

Stephen Colbert

more info

“Daddy made for us himself elaborate kites that needed to be taken miles out of town to a pasture long enough (and my father was not afraid of horses and cows watching) for him to run with and get up on a long cord to which my mother held the spindle, and then we children were given it to hold, tugging like something alive at our hands. They were beautiful, sound, shapely box kites, smelling delicately of office glue for their entire short lives.”

Eudora Welty

more info

“Mother-love, in beasts and birds, can’t always be observed carefully, because of innate animal secrecy, but—to revisit an old Ohio highway for a moment—I once encountered a mother quail leading her young across the road in a single file. She diverted my attention from them by pretending to have a broken wing, and flopped around almost at my feet, in an exhibition of bravura acting something like that of the late Lionel Barrymore as Rasputin. When the small birds had disappeared into the deep grass, she flew calmly away and joined them.”

James Thurber

more info

“In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, ‘Prove it.’ He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.”

Milton Glaser

more info

“Like anyone else, she must have wanted different things at the same time. The human heart is a dark forest.”

Tobias Wolff

more info

“What can you say about the first woman in your life? She was Mum. She sorted me out. She fed me. She was forever slicking my hair and straightening my clothes, in public. Humiliation. But it’s Mum. I didn’t realize until later that she was also my mate. She could make me laugh. There was music all the time, and I do miss her so.”

Keith Richards

more info

“My overcoat is so dreary that I know maman would never have tolerated the black or gray scarf I always wear with it, and I keep hearing her voice telling me to wear a little color.
        For the first time, then, I decide to wear a colored scarf (Scotch plaid).”

Roland Barthes

more info

“The profound modesty she had—that made her possess, not no belongings at all (no asceticism), but very few belongings—as if she wanted, at her death, that there would be no ‘getting rid of’ what had belonged to her.”

Roland Barthes

more info

“The lambs had nursed and the ewe was lying quiet. One lamb had settled itself on the mother’s back and was a perfect miniature of the old one—they reminded me of a teapot we have, whose knob is a tiny replica of the pot itself.”

E. B. White

more info

“My mother wasn’t a very patient woman. If I complained about being lonely or bored, she’d tell me to go help someone, anyone. To this day, when I start feeling sorry for myself, I look for a good deed to do.”

Donna Brazile

more info