Daughters Quotes

I missed my one true friend, my mother. She and I were close in a way I don't think many other mothers and daughters were. I slept beside her every night of my childhood: so near to her back, I could probably sketch the constellation of moles and freckles on her skin there. When I was a very little girl, every morning I would wake before her and arrange myself so that when she woke, we were eye-to-eye. I miss her, with a never-ending ache that I did not think was possible, that crowds out any other feeling and certainly all reason, and any good sense.

~ Kaitlyn Greenidge

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazardfrom the shelf, but with Nabokov's firstsentence I knew it wasn't the thingto read to a dying man:The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,and common sense tells us that our existenceis but a brief crack of lightbetween two eternities of darkness.The words disturbed both of us immediately,and I stopped. With music it was the same --Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked meto turn it off. He ceased eating, and dranklittle, while the tumors briskly appropriatedwhat was left of him.But to return to the cradle rocking. I thinkNabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.That's why babies howl at birth,and why the dying so often reachfor something only they can apprehend.At the end they don't want their handsto be under the covers, and if you should putyour hand on theirs in a tentative gestureof solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;and you must honor that desire,and let them pull it free.

~ Jane Kenyon

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

~ Barbara Blatner

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

~ Barbara Blatner

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

~ Barbara Blatner

blue-gold sky, fresh cloud, emerald-black mountain, trees on rocky ledges, on the summit, the tiny pin of a telephone tower-all brilliantly clear, in shadow and out. and on and through everything everywhere the sun shines without reservation (p. 97)

~ Barbara Blatner

Nefret was still pouting when Emerson helped her into the carriage. Emerson did not observe the pout. He would not have observed it (men being what they are) even if something had not distracted him.

~ Elizabeth Peters

What their scorned, over-fucked mothers never teach them is this: men can be hurt, too.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

I won,” said Chelsea’s dad, and went to give Chelsea a high-five, but missed, as they were standing too close.“My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.”“Oh,” Chelsea said.And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, distracted now by something—maybe the plant in the far corner, standing and waiting like a person in a dream; or maybe the green shoe or some other thing that was out there and longing, to be looked at, and taken—wasn’t ready, and their hands, his then hers, passed through the air in a kind of wave, a little goodbye.

~ Tao Lin

Doomed to Hell. Every last one of you.

~ June Ahern

Rolando pursed his lips and sighed. “Just be careful.” “Why, because her father carries a gun?” Isaac said. “Aren’t you the one who always said guns don’t shoot people?”“No, it was you who said that.” Rolando corrected his son. “I’ve said fathers with guns and beautiful daughters shoot people. Boys in particular.” “You worry too much, dad.” “One day, when you are a father, you will understand.

~ Felix Alexander

Whatever it is that you think you have discovered. You must forget it.


~ Diane Samuels

But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life.

~ Claire Messud

If daughters couldn't soften a man, then nothing would.

~ Linda Weaver Clarke

Do not forget to tell your daughters God made them beautiful.

~ Habeeb Akande

I hope someday she meets just the right man and has babies - a whole passel of babies, more than I could have - so she understands how it kills me now that she won't let me hug her when she's in obvious distress. (The Life You've Imagined)

~ Kristina Riggle

Papi, I don't know what to do anymore. Lourdes begins to cry. No matter what I do, Pilar hates me.Pilar doesn't hate you, hija. She just hasn't learned to love you yet.

~ Cristina García

Last of all, this book owes perhaps its biggest debt to the ultimate models for Kira and Heron and every other awesome girl in the Partials series: my two daughters. May you always have heroines to inspire you, role models to look up to, and the freedom and courage to make your own choices, no matter how simple or scary or hard or eternal they may be.

~ Dan Wells

Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.

~ Alice Hoffman

The Truth is, we all get lost as we try to find our way. Perhaps the key is to stop, take a look around and enjoy the scenery as we go.

~ Jatawny Muckelvene Chatmon

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.

~ Jodi Picoult

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

~ Milan Kundera

We must teach our girls that if they speak their mind, they can create the world they want to see. (145)

~ Robyn Silverman

Like a detective keenly searching for clues, our daughters are solving the mystery of womanhood itself.

~ Melia Keeton-Digby

In my dating career, I had found that mothers seemed to like me; fathers did not. Period. So I tended to avoid contact with the dads. I assumed that this wasn't personal. Rather, it was simply the fact that I was a hormone-laden, male teenager with a fully functional penis, who happened to be in the presence of their daughters.

~ Robin Yocum

Mothers and daughters together are a powerful force to be reckoned with

~ Melia Keeton-Digby

No matter how old you are, you always want your mother’s love and acceptance. I guess I’m hoping one day I’ll get it back.

~ Hilary Grossman

He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter’s face when she blushed.

~ Roman Payne

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

He was too smitten by his second wife and the sons she produced easily and regularly at eighteen-month intervals to bother too much about a daughter.

~ Anita Nair

I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.

~ Elizabeth Berg

Since you haven’t got a name,” he said. “I guess you can pick one for yourself. Would you like to pick one for me to write down?”She stopped rocking and looked at him. “I can do that? It’s legal and everything?”He smiled. “It’s a free country again,” he said. “At least in theory.”She nodded. “And when I pick a name it can be any name I want?”He nodded.“What’s your name?”“Victor,” he said. “Vic, for short.”“Okay,” she said, leaning forward and taking the pad from under his large thing hands. “How do you spell that?”He spelled it and she wrote it down. Her handwriting was perfectly small and legible. “Can I be Victor, too?” she said, looking up from the pad.He smirked. “It’s a boy’s name,” he said. “You’re a girl. You have to add an i and an a to the end if you want to make it a girl’s name.”She looked down at the name she had written and added the letters i and a to the end. “Victoria,” she said, passing the notepad back to the cop.“Hello, Victoria,” he said, smiling, taking the pad and pen back and presenting his hand for a shake. “It’s nice to meet you, officially.

~ Benjamin R. Smith

I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they were spread around like ghost stories, our parents hoping that fear would do the job that our judgment might not.

~ Karen Thompson Walker

Girls should be strong together. Strong like steel, merry like the tinkling of chimes dancing in the wind.

~ Kristin Halbrook

This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

~ Zadie Smith

You are not broken and in need of fixing. You are wounded and in need of healing.

~ Danu Morrigan

When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in front of his daughter, while his son may gorge on the whole tree, burn it for firewood and piss on the stump, and still be reckoned a blessing to his father.

~ Jeanette Winterson

    The only one in the valley who was working was Mooney Wright.    Harrison leaned over and kneaded his hands roughly. He was wary of Mooney. Mooney was a strong one, not subject to weakness at all. He had done only one grievous act, in Harrison's mind. He had taken Lorry and the boys from him.    For a man to be jealous of his daughter was a damnable thing, Harrison thought, though he realized he had been jealous of Lorry for years. It was to her that he had let his heart go out, yes, back when she was a small thing.

~ John Ehle

Her eyes traced the sleek shape of the table's legs, the sinuous curves of its corners, the gleam of its reflective, dark brown surface. She noticed that every time she breathed out, the surface fogged, and she disappeared from her father's table.

~ Khaled Hosseini