Phyllis Bottome Quotes

The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother--both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child's history is never finished.

Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

Maybe we're all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they're extraordinary.

If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.

No one ever saw all of him. It took me nearly four decades to allow my father his shadows, his reserve, to sit silently with him and not clamor for something more.

It can be the best of relationships and the worst of relationships - often at the same time. The bond between a mother and daughter is one of the strongest, but it's also among the most complicated.

There's this unspoken history that exists between any mother and daughter, no matter how deep and loving the bond is, twenty-five years of being raised by someone, there's a kind of deep history which means that there are shortcuts to getting on each other's nerves.

The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life [...] the stronger the daughter.

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.

I had the great advantage of a mother who used to tell me the most beautiful years of a woman's life are ages 35 to 45.

The mother is the early care giver and primary source of identification for all children.... A daughter continues to identify with the mother

A light-heel'd mother makes a heavy-heel'd daughter.

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

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

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother, so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. I wasn't as close to her then as I nowadays, in retrospect, wish I had been.

You can always tell how a man will treat his wife by the way he treats his mother.

You must be a terrible burden to your mother. I am feeling so sorry for her not to have a proper daughter." Mrs. Apusenja - To the Nines

If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule. Never lie to yourself.

When I got this role, my daughter Molly said, 'Dad, you've come full circle.

How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

Emily and I have some funny scenes where we quarrel and it gets quite heated, the mother-daughter relationship. You know, film mothers and daughters adore each other. And some don't. But how could you not love Emily Blunt? But I think I'm just one of those people who's always discontented.

My family life, my adoption - it could be related to the songs, but I think the songs are deeper than that. They're not just about this experience.

I've seen a lot in my life. My dad was pretty gnarly but I loved him and I wouldn't change it for the world. My mom's a survivor.

Fathers be good to your daughters, daughters will love like you do. Girls become lovers, who turn into mothers, so mothers be good to your daughters, too.