Pastoral Resources

My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.

After my mother died, I found, a little book of hers which recorded everything I had ever done, how I had done it, and how proud she was of her son Conrad.

My earliest memory is dreamlike: in a small orchard or garden I am carried on the arm, I believe, of my father; there was a group of grown-ups, my mother among them, and the group was slowly walking in the orchard, it seems toward the house.

For me, the summer will be pure gray - mother-of-pearl gray, very pale gray. To me, this is the big statement for summer. Then we have light blue, light turquoise, lots of pink.

I got to grow up with a mother who taught me to believe in me.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

Country and western is the music of the devil. That's the real truth of the matter. My late Mother, bless her, loved country and western. God, I couldn't handle it.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

Because my parents, growing up, they worked hard. Everyone in my family woke up early in the morning. I used to see my mother and my father go off to work, and come back and, no matter what, they had time for the kids.

People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.

I got nothing. I got my shoes and my pants. I'm staying with a friend. I stop by my mother's every once in a while to get my calls. I don't want to be anywhere anybody can find me.

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.

I always loved my mother, felt loved, but she was judgmental. Her father in Ireland didn't approve of women generally, and she took on his values. She believed her own mother was foolish.

I keep seeing myself in my daughter, and I see my mother in me and in her. Bloody hell.