Mother Daughter Quotes

“You're so beautiful," said Alice. "I'm afraid of looking at you and not knowing who you are."
"I think that even if you don't know who I am someday, you'll still know that I love you."
"What if I see you, and I don't know that you're my daughter, and I don't know that you love me?"
"Then, I'll tell you that I do, and you'll believe me.”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“Since I’ve been home I’ve been trying hard to mend my relationship with my mother. Asking her to do things for me instead of brushing aside any offer of help, as I did for years out of anger. Letting her handle all the money I won. Returning her hugs instead of tolerating them. My time in the arena made me realize how I needed to stop punishing her for something she couldn’t help, specifically the crushing depression she fell into after my father’s death. Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“I want to go back to the tell-me-again times when I slept in her bed and we were everything together. When I was everything to her. Everything she needed.”
― Erica Lorraine Scheidt, Uses for Boys

“There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?"

My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.

Now," she said, "you will know how to answer.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

“My voice was a bare rasp of fear. "In the weaving room, the women say it's never been this bad before..."
"They always say that when things get difficult," she answered softly. Then she sat up suddenly as though coming fully awake. Reaching down, she took my chin in her hand and tipped my face to look up at hers. "Remember, Gwen, no matter who says what, the important thing is to understand what needs to be done, and then do it. No matter how hard it is, or how much pain you feel. It's as simple as that, really. Once you know what you have to do, you just do it.”
― Persia Woolley, Child of the Northern Spring

“The debt between a child and her mother could never be repaid, like running a foot race against someone fifteen miles ahead of you. What hope did you have of catching up? It didn't matter how many Mother's Day cards you drew, how many cliches and vows of devotions you put inside them. You could tell her she was your favorite parent, wink like you were co-conspirators, fill her in on every trivial detail of your life. None of it was enough. It had taken me years to figure this out: you would never love your mother as much as she loved you. She had formed memories of you since you were a poppy seed in her belly. You didn't begin making your own memories until three, four, five years old? She'd had a running start. She had known you before you even existed. How could we compete with that? We couldn't. We accepted that our mothers held their love over us, let them parade it around like a flashy trinket, because their love was superior to ours.”
― Stephanie Wrobel, Darling Rose Gold

“One sister may internalize the message and say, “Okay, I will show you what I can do and how worthy I am” and become an overachiever and a perfectionist. The other sister may internalize this message of inferiority and give up, feeling that she can’t make the grade anyway; she becomes an underachiever or engages in some kind of lifelong self-sabotage.”
― Karyl McBride, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

“When children can’t rely on their parents to meet their needs, they cannot develop a sense of safety, trust, or confidence. Trust is a colossal development issue. Without the learning of trust in our early years, we are set up to have a major handicap with believing in ourselves and feeling safe in intimate connections.”
― Karyl McBride, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

“Daughters of narcissistic mothers absorb the message “I am valued for what I do, rather than for who I am.”
― Karyl McBride, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

“The two of us praying like this to the Black Madonna Sudenly washes over me, and I'm filled with love for my mother. The best gift she has give me is the constancy of her belief. Whatever I become, she loves me. To her, I am enough.”
― ann kidd taylor, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

“It has long been my motto that if you cannot get your act together... then the very least you can do is try to make your act entertaining.”
― Becky Johnson, We Laugh, We Cry, We Cook: A Mom and Daughter Dish about the Food That Delights Them and the Love That Binds Them

“Because my mother couldn't change my present, I decided to change my daughter's future”
― Manal al-Sharif

“I read somewhere that spiders can spin silk strong enough to hold the weight of a thousand trucks. I tried to imagine those lines of silver, thinner than air, stronger than steel. Sometimes I think that a hundred webs, invisible gossamers, connect Gracie and me. They coat our bodies, tie our limbs together, link our hearts. They can stretch across cities, countries – even anger. Unbreakable. I felt them that first time I watched her play soccer.
She needed to win so badly. I watched a new Gracie crack out of her cocoon that day. Grey, moth-like, she seemed covered in a dust that let her take to the air. Fly. They’re beautiful things, moths, with their dark patterned wings hooking on wind to push them forward. You have to be careful with them, though. Brush them just lightly, and they can’t fly anymore.”
― Cath Crowley, The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain

“In the tell-me-again times, (…) when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud, a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon that we shared. I could stretch out like a five-pointed star and then she'd bundle me back up in her arms. I'd wake in the morning tangled in her hair.”
― Erica Lorraine Scheidt, Uses for Boys

“You and I are extremely alike. Sometimes people who are alike don’t get along too well. Qualities that other people would respect, they take for granted in each other, and qualities that they wish they could curb in themselves, seem magnified in the other person. It’s like looking into a hypercritical mirror.”
― J.W. Lynne, Above the Sky

“Castiza: "False! I defy you both!
I have endured you with an ear of fire;
Your tongues have struck hot irons on my face!
Mother, come from that poisonous woman there."
Gratiana: "Where?"
Castiza: "Do you not see her? She's too inward then.”
― Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy

“Prove that you are my daughter, prove that you are mine. Prove to me that you are the blood of the dragon. Prove you are worthy of that mark on your skin.”
― Melissa de la Cruz, The Isle of the Lost

“Well, that was certainly a disgusting display worthy of your father's family."
"Shut up, Ma," Lisa Livia said, her hands on her hips. "Like you weren't born in the Bronx, and the Fortunatos weren't a big step up for you. Now you listen to me. You try to move this wedding away from Two Rivers again, I'm gonna clean every skeleton out of every closet you got and make them dance, you hear me? I'll dig up everything you ever buried, including my daddy, and then I'll sink that beat-up rowboat you're living on so you'll be out in the street with nothing. Do not fuck with my kid and do not fuck with my friend, they are all the family I got, and they are off-limits to you. Understand?”
― Jennifer Crusie, Agnes and the Hitman

“And then she knew me.
I saw the knowing arrive, wonderful and terrible. In my memory she has two different faces at once, like the god she named me for: On one face is riotous joy, blazing at me like the sun itself. On the other is deepest mourning, the keening, marrow-deep ache of someone who has looked for something too long and found it too late.
She reached her hand toward me, and I saw her mouth move. Jan-u-ary.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“I am never going to make that decision for you. You are my daughter, and I will always be your sounding board and give you advice, but I can't just tell you what to do. Not like that. You are your own person, and you have to make the choice you can live with.”
― Dot Hutchison, Roses of May

“I love Alice more than life itself, but I can't keep her hidden forever.”
― Kellyn Roth, The Dressmaker's Secret

“So please try to keep in mind that, when I plague you, I do so because you’re the only person I can plague.”
― Kellyn Roth, Flowers

“I was too happy that we were speaking again to let her annoyance feel like anything other than the feeble blows that daughters lob against their mothers to make sure they'll still be loved, even at their most peevish.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir