31 Literary Mother’s Day Quotes That Are Not All About Sweetness & Light

It’s Mother’s Day, and of course, it is time to reflect on the loveliness of motherhood – whether it is thanking our mothers, or our children for giving us the chance to grow as mothers. Yet, we don’t have words sometimes for how hard or crazy motherhood is; or how unprepared for it we are. So why not look at some Mother’s Day quotes?

That’s when these amazingly insightful writers come to your rescue. Cutting, humorous or poignant, these mother’s day quotes show you things as they really are, when it comes to motherhood – not all sweetness and light!

These Mother’s Day quotes tell you to stop putting mothers on a pedestal. Because motherhood is beautiful but it can also be about conflict, negotiation, acceptance and identity issues.

2

“But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven

3

“Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.”
― Joanne Harris, The Girl with No Shadow

4

“God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.”
― Phyllis McGinley

5

“Sometimes being a good mother gets in the way of being a good person.”
― Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, A Woman of Independent Means

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6

“Of course mothers and daughters with strong personalities might see the world from very different points of view.”
― Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

7

“And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I’m betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.”
― Jessica Valenti, Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness

8

“Never argue with a mother who’s scolding her child.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

9

“The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.”
― Anna Quindlen

10

“A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

11

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one after she died, I liked having a dead mother much more than having an impossible one.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

12

“I wasn’t put on this earth to be housekeeper to my own child or to anyone else for that matter.”
― Lynn Freed

13

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

14

“Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary

15

“But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

16

“I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.”
― Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith

17

“Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. “Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?” “Don’t you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?” “Wasn’t there any change?”
― Erma Bombeck

18

“My mother’s menu consisted of two choices: Take it or leave it.”
― Buddy Hackett

19

“She was a monster, but she was my monster.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

20

“Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done.”
― Rebecca Woolf

21

“There’s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”
― Stephen King

22

“Maybe a mother wasn’t what she seemed to be on the surface.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

23

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”
― J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

24

“Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel

25

“The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.”
― Dorothy Parker

26

“24/7. Once you sign on to be a mother, that’s the only shift they offer.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

27

“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
― Margaret Sanger

28

“It’s come at last”, she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

29

“… by and large, mothers and house wives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

30

“Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves.”
― Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune

31

“Taking care of myself doesn’t mean ‘me first.’ It means ‘me, too.”
― L.R. Knost

Are there any more such Mother’s Day quotes you can suggest? Do add a comment.

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