Pastoral Resources

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.

Understood what the struggle was about. My mother. Couldn't read or write, but she had more sense than many a graduate from Harvard.

In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.

My mother always said don't marry for money, divorce for money.

Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in.

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.

Just as a mother finds pleasure in taking her little child on her lap, there to feed and caress him, in like manner our loving God shows His fondness for His beloved souls who have given themselves entirely to Him and have placed all their hope in His goodness.

I was born because my mother needed a fourth for meals.

In the seventeenth year of my age my mother died.

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

I demand for the unmarried mother, as a sacred channel of life, the same reverence and respect as for the married mother; for Maternity is a cosmic thing and once it has come to pass, our conversation must not be permitted to blaspheme it.

I stand fearlessly for small dogs, the American Flag, motherhood and the Bible. That's why people love me.

The relationship I have to my fatherland is like that of mothers with crippled children: they love them all the more, the more crippled they are. Germany is the background of all my plans, the return to Germany.

As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation.

Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.