There is an emptiness inside of me—a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional and strong as a mother's love. And I will never be loved that way again.

—Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters

love mother motherhood emptiness

About Hope Edelman

Portrait of Hope Edelman

Hope Edelman (born June 17, 1964) is an American non-fiction author, essayist, and writing instructor.

More quotations from Hope Edelman

When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it's the loss of all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past. You also lose the final buffer between you and death. Even if you're an adult, it's weird to be orphaned.

—Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters

You're driving in the car and you feel like your whole world has fallen apart. And people in the car beside you are laughing and carrying on. Their life is normal, and you think, 'What gives you the right to laugh?' Because nothing has happened to them. You don't understand how everything else can go on normally when your life will never be normal again. Ever.

—Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters

When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn't pathological. It's normal. It's why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother.

—Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters

grief loss mother daughter

More quotations tagged with “motherhood”

I don't need a baby growing inside me for nine months. For one thing, there's morning sickness. If I'm going to feel nauseous and achy when I wake up, I want to achieve that state the old fashioned way: getting good and drunk the night before.

—Ellen DeGeneres

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Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

—Barbara Kingsolver

strength laws motherhood

Being a mother is a noble status, right? Right. So why does it change when you put "unwed" or "welfare" in front of it?

—Florynce Kennedy

nobility marriage motherhood welfare

All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysands to foist their problems onto the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.

—Germaine Greer

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She had risen and was walking about the room, her fat, worn face sharpening with a sort of animal alertness into power and protection. The claws that hide in every maternal creature slipped out of the fur of good manners.

—Margaret Deland

power manners walking protection motherhood alertness

History

6 Feb 2019 Added