Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions.
—Nancy Stahl
Why not have your first baby at sixty, when your husband is already dead and your career is over? Then you can really devote yourself to it.
—Fran Lebowitz
No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
—Florida Scott-Maxwell
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
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
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
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
—Barbara Kingsolver
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
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
How insulting is it to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I'm betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.
—Jessica Valenti in Why Have Kids?