Pastoral Resources

I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values.

My mother taught me to read.

I sincerely believe that if Bush and Cheney recognized the full humanity of other people's mothers around the world, they wouldn't commit the crimes they commit.

I get whatever placidity I have from my father. But my mother taught me how to take it on the chin.

Simply having children does not make mothers.

I never thought to myself, I'm going to grow up and fall in love with a man or I'm going to fall in love with a woman because my mother is a lesbian.

I'm one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.

I believe the question now is: who murdered my mother?

I visited my father for the full ten years that he was in prison, so we already had a deep and loving relationship, and remembered our mother at those times.

Our family had been shattered, but we now are more united, and the remains of my family and the majority of my mother's family are glad to know the truth about a horrible crime.

A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don't like her daughter to resemble her in.

I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.

My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.

My mother is probably the wisest person I've ever known. She's not schooled, she's not well read. But she has a philosophy of life that makes well-read people seem like morons.

My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.

I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It's chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.

I could not tell you the date of my mother's death. I could not tell you the date of my dad's death. These are not dates that I find significant.

Nicole will come up in conversations where it's in a part of the conversation. Or we may be somewhere and I would tell some story about their mother and I. You know, we always honor her birthday.

I am less selfish. But I am more insistent on being part of the creative experience. I find I am a better mother, lover and wife when I am writing. When my daughter was small I wasn't writing as much and I didn't miss it.

My parents had a wonderful marriage, but it was a very dependent relationship. My mother was entirely dependent on my father because that's how it was in those days.