Honore de Balzac Quotes

Being a mother is probably the hardest job in the world. I feel like, in a lot of ways, children come into the world to teach us.

A mother has, perhaps, the hardest earthly lot; and yet no mother worthy of the name ever gave herself thoroughly for her child who did not feel that, after all, she reaped what she had sown.

Becoming a mother is the best thing that's happened to me.

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.

I think my mother characters have changed a lot since Sasha was born, just because I understand what a hard job it is now, and I'm coming at it from another angle - like you just love and care about this person so much, and just want to protect them from everything.

Being a mother adds another emotional dimension, a feel for children that I didn't have before I had one. They were a pain before.

Eventually, I'll go back to acting, but for right now, my children are the most important thing in the world to me.

Everything changes as a mother. Yes, work has changed. The projects that I choose are even more important to me now. The world he's growing up in and the kind of stimulus that is out there; they are so precious and I'd do anything to protect him.

It is of little traits that the greatest human character is composed.

I guess if there is a big spiritual experience in my life, it is me becoming a mother.

Having a child as a single mother was a crucible - maybe this is true for all parents. I got rid of so much stuff that didn't really matter in the scheme of things-like throwing stuff out of an airplane that kept me flying too low. What was left was essential, i.e. not a lot of extraneous stuff that had kept me busy and people-pleasing. I just didn't have the luxury of wasting my life force on so much stupidity and distraction. That made me strong.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

I read [The Women's Room] in my 20s, and I was like, "I understand this now." And now I've become a mom and read it again and truly understand on a different level what one of the main characters goes through as a mother.

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for.

Good mothers are underrated, just like good defense.

The mother...swinging the children by pulling on a length of string, while at the same time she kept and eye on them with that protective watchfulness, half animal, half angelic, which is the quality of motherhood.

A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day--nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone's mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.

Life is only lived full-time by women with children.

I was a welfare worker for the Indian Council for Child Welfare. I'll tell you a story. Rajiv was only four years old at that time, and was going to kindergarten. One day the mother of one of his little friends came to see us and said in a sugary voice, 'Oh, it must be so sad for you to have no time to spend with your little boy!' Rajiv roared like a lion: 'My mother spends more time with me than you spend with your little boy, see! Your little boy says you always leave him alone so you can play bridge!' I detest women who do nothing and they play bridge.

There's such a grace and understanding in the female persona when women have really come into their own. Part of that is to have children, and to be caring for those children, and not only in the care for them, but also in the nurturing and raising of them, they have to pass on their souls and their intelligence. And all those things can't be taught. It's something that, that in the essence of a woman, the essence of a mother, a mother knows!

In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

Being a mother for me was like, "Oh, this is what I've been looking for my whole life." This brings me a sense of completion. I never knew I would love this deeply.

I think because I was a mother, it helped me feel comfortable that really my primary goal there was to save my kids.

Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.