#other

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. ↗

— Louise Erdrich

#next-life #otherworld #underworld #women #men

Any man, you'll soon learn, has an insurmountable need to blame someone else when he is made to look a fool. ↗

— Julia Quinn

#foolish #men #men

In its various forms, so far as we know them, Love seems always to have a deep significance and a most practical importance to us little mortals. In one form, as the mere semi-conscious Sex-love, which runs through creation and is common to the lowest animals and plants, it appears as a kind of organic basis for the unity of all creatures; in another, as the love of the mother for her offspring—which may also be termed a passion—it seems to pledge itself to the care and guardianship of the future race; in another, as the marriage of man and woman, it becomes the very foundation of human society. And so we can hardly believe that in its homogenic form, with which we are here concerned, it has not also a deep significance, and social uses and functions which will become clearer to us, the more we study it. ↗

— Edward Carpenter

#animals #homosexuality #human-sexuality #love #marriage

The Mother of God is asked to 'pray zealously to her Son and her God,' and the words of the psalm are put into her mouth:'My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. for He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.' It is because of her child that she says this, He will magnify her ('For He that is mighty hath done to me great things'): He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For everyone of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men-it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later. ↗

— Boris Pasternak

#life

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down. ↗

— John Edgar Wideman

#children #language #words #music

Always respect Mother Nature. Especially when she weighs 400 pounds and is guarding her baby. ↗

— James Rollins

#mother-nature #mothers #nature

Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa’s forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. “What? ↗

— David Mitchell

#daughter #father #growing-up #human-nature #identity

Motherhood is a nature, and fatherhood is a culture.. Motherhood is a certainty while fatherhood is an assumption.. Motherhood is original to the female whereas fatherhood is an acquired extension.. ↗

— Arabic saying

#nature

When we trust the makers of baby formula more than we do our own ability to nourish our babies, we lose a chance to claim an aspect of our power as women. Thinking that baby formula is as good as breast milk is believing that thirty years of technology is superior to three million years of nature's evolution. Countless women have regained trust in their bodies through nursing their children, even if they weren't sure at first that they could do it. It is an act of female power, and I think of it as feminism in its purest form. ↗

— Christine Northrup

#children #common-sense #conflict #feminism #health

Sometimes being a good mother gets in the way of being a good person. ↗

— Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

#mother #independence