A Quote by Anne Lamott
Intelligence, goodness, humanity, excitement, serenity. Over time, these are the things that change the musculature of your face, as do laughter, and animation, and especially whatever peace you can broker with the person inside. It's furrow, pinch, and judgement that make us look older - our mothers were right. They said that if you made certain faces, they would stick, and they do. But our mothers forgot that faces of kindness and integrity stick as well.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.
As children, we looked up to our maids and our nannies, who were playing in some ways the role of our mothers. They were paid to be nice to us, to look after us, teach us things and take time out of their day to be with us. As a child you think of these people as an extension of your mother.
Most of us in the baby-boom generation were raised by full-time mothers. Even as recently as 14 years ago, 6 out of 10 mothers with babies were staying at home. Today that is totally reversed. Does that mean we love our children less than our mothers loved us? No, but it certainly causes a lot of guilt trips.
There was actually a camera on your face. I don't know so much about the animation process but the camera was in our face so it could get expressions from our faces that would eventually arrive on the gnomes. It almost felt like you were cheating at times because it was a wee bit too much fun. You were in that box on your own. Kelly [Asbury] was in Toronto, I was in LA, so I was just on my own. I thought: "I can't be getting paid for this as well!"
Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.
We show our faces to demand that politicians making promises stick to those promises. We show our faces to ensure that the youth of today will flourish tomorrow.
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave Them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us, and delivered us, bound, to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
I have two children myself. I always laugh; they have you playing mothers pretty early, us women. You look at the television, the mothers get younger and younger, and the children get older and older, and you start to wonder when these people had these children. Were they breeding when they were 12?
I've been treated really well for 'Stick It.' There was this cop and he pulled me over and he was like, 'Oh my God, you're in 'Stick It.' I said, 'Yes. Yes. You're the last person I would think would be pumped up by this movie'. He let me go, so that was nice.
Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.
I'm not saying that all women are blameless - all women are not. There are women with despicable characters who are cruel and terrible and some of them are mothers. But why do we blame our mothers more than our fathers? We let our fathers get away scot-free. We hardly even knew who they were in many cases, given the way this culture raises kids, and they may have been quite cruel. They may even have raped us as children, but even if they raped us, we will blame our mothers for not protecting us instead of blaming our fathers who actually did it.
What if more women, mothers, gave birth as an ecstatic celebration of female sexuality? Mothers who do will often declare, "Now I can do anything!" What would the world look like if half of our population felt empowered to make a difference with their lives?
For Germany, Poland is now a more important trade partner than Russia. With respect to history, our peoples will require more time for the wounds to heal. But it is also important to stick to the truth in accounting for the past. This is not compatible with, for instance, TV movies such as "Our mothers, our fathers" that try to partly shift the liability for Nazi crimes to us Poles.
It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.
One of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist