#motherhood

Out of the woman's great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, ans she let it flow. There was more than enough for the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him. ↗

— Pearl S. Buck

#power-of-women #life

Motherhood is the greatest thing and the hardest thing. ↗

— Ricki Lake

#greatest thing #hardest #motherhood #the hardest thing #thing

Motherhood is the only thing in my life that I've really known for sure is something I wanted to do. ↗

— Cynthia Nixon

#known #life #motherhood #my life #only

The biggest surprise, which is also the best, is that I didn't know I would love motherhood as much as I do. ↗

— Deborah Norville

#best #biggest #biggest surprise #i #i do

I had a dozen years to act before starting a family then found that motherhood dwarfed everything else. Once or twice a year, I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value. ↗

— Sissy Spacek

#appeals #before #dozen #dwarfed #else

In the book Soldiers on the Home Front, I was greatly struck by the fact that in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. An what's her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she's disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, hear beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together. ↗

— Anne Frank

#women-s-strength #beauty

It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless. ↗

— L.R. Knost

#children #inspirational-quotes #motherhood #parenting #age

Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love. ↗

— Janet Goodfriend

#best #book-club #cape-cod #character #community

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#children #love #motherhood #life

I used to fear their deaths--the car! the dog! the sea! the germ!--until I realized it need never be a problem: on the trolley, on the way to the mortuary, I would put my hands into their ribs and take their hearts and swallow them, and give birth to them again, so that they would never, ever end. ↗

— Caitlin Moran

#death