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"By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class." --
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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"Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines." -- Amy Tan, in The Kitchen God's Wife
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"Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women's opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering." -- Elaine Heffner
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"God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is useful to the point of necessity when they are adolescents." -- Phyllis McGinley
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"Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter." -- Betty Rollin
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"If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much." --
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
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"I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it." -- Rose Kennedy
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"Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother." -- Jane Welsh Carlyle
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"A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary." -- Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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"She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions -- and in the end doing them irreparable harm." -- Marcia Muller
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"If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent." -- Bette Davis
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"Women who miscalculate are called mothers." -- Abigail Van Buren
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"Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs... since the payment is pure love." -- Mildred B. Vermont
• "Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them!" -- Margaret Mitchell
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"Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come." --
Louisa May Alcott, in Little Women, chapter 36
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"Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes
And stringing pretty words that make no sense."
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
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