A Quote by David Lammy

Throughout her life my mother, Rose, prayed for good health. My father left when I was 12 and money was tight, so she couldn't afford to take time off work. I have a younger sister and three older brothers, and she used to panic that we'd be taken into care if she wasn't able to look after us.
My older sister is a working mom. She's busy. She chooses to spend money on her children. But she should be able to afford a good shoe for herself.
Mom spent the time that she was supposed to be a kid actully raising children, her younger brother and younger sister. She was tough as nails and did not suffer fools at all. And the truth was she could not afford to. She spoke the truth, bluntly, directly, and without much varnish. I am her son.
One thing I did have under my belt was, my mother lost her mother when she was 11. She mourned her mother her whole life and made my grandmother seem present even though I never met her. I couldn't imagine how my mom could go on but she did, she took care of us, she worked two jobs and had four children. She was such a good example of how to conduct oneself in a time of grief. When I lost my husband, I tried to model myself as much as I could on her.
When I was growing up my mom was home. She wanted to go to work, but she waited. She was educated as a teacher. The minute my youngest sister went to school full-time, from first grade, mom went back to work. But she balanced her life. She chose teaching, which enabled her to leave at the same time we left, and come home pretty much the same time we came home. She knew how to balance.
Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up, Ben; she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She's a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She's a twelve-year-old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because mama had to go to Heaven. She's a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She's all the unsung heroes who couldn't make it but never quit.
I think of Harriet Muse as one fierce lady. She couldn't read. She had no education. She did labor her whole life. And she stood up to Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey at a time where she was told where to work, where to sit, and she demanded that they pay attention to her.
My mother was a full-time mother. She didn't have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences... everything was for her children. I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving - she's better than me.
It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.
When he held her that way, she felt so happy that it disturbed her. After he left, it would take her hours to fall asleep, and then when she woke up she would feel another onrush of agitated happiness, which was a lot like panic. She wished she could grab the happiness and mash it into a ball and hoard it and gloat over it, but she couldn't. It just ran around all over the place, disrupting everything.
I lived in New York until I was eleven years old, when my mother left my two older sisters and my father. My mother is 90 percent blind and deaf. She left and moved all the way to California. So I left my two older sisters and my father behind at the age of eleven and moved cross-country to take care of her.
My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.
Sarah Brown is a sweetie to work with. She's a good actress. She's gutsy and she comes in and she knows her lines. She's just terrific. Sometimes I forget how young she is, because she truly walked right in and took the territory and was able to hold her own with people who've been here for so many years. To be able to pull that off [for someone who had never been on a show], I really give the woman a lot of credit. She's done great.
You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.
My mother was very passionate about life and she would do anything for us. And she had to fight alone to raise us. We never had a lot of money for extras or anything. She had to work six days a week, and then she would do breakfast, lunch and dinner. She was a super-woman! For me, I don't know how she did it with three kids.
My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.
She flew into his arms. Held on tight as he swung her off her feet and hugged her so hard it hurt. She didn't care. She didn't want him to ever let go.
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