A Quote by Nina Bawden
I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.
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My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.
At 11, I passed the scholarship - only just; I wasn't very good at maths - to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales.
I was born an ugly duckling due to my mother's ill health. She wasn't supposed to be pregnant, there were all kinds of complications, she couldn't survive a cesarean section etc. She said, "They didn't hand me a child, they handed me a purple melon." I heard that when I had grown up and had no idea of the whole story because the family album had pictures of a covered carriage and my mother smiling so I assumed I was asleep.
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
So I called and said, 'Mommy, I'm doing a political film with Jean-Luc Godard. You have to come and sign the contract.' She thought I was lying, so she hung up the phone. But then she came the next day, even though she had never taken an airplane in her life. She came to Paris and she signed my contract.
Part of me always wanted to do something useful for the world. It came from my mother. She is a paediatrician and she was active in a small NGO for the child victims of war.
You had every right to be. He raised his eyes to look at her and she was suddenly and strangely reminded of being four years old at the beach, crying when the wind came up and blew away the castle she had made. Her mother had told her she could make another one if she liked, but it hadn't stopped her crying because what she had thought was permanent was not permanent after all, but only made out of sand that vanished at the touch of wind and water.
One girl, actually, in the UK — it was a really small show in Wales — a girl came up to me and said that because of one of my songs she was still alive. She’d decided not to commit suicide. It was a really emotional moment.
At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone.
My mother raised two children on a housing estate, in a place where people said once you got on, you never got off. And she believed in me. So when people tell you that you can't, you can.
My first love is my mother. She did so much for us as children as a single parent. I watched her make a dollar out of fifteen cents. I thought she was either a magician or she had God's actual phone number. She wasn't a motivational speaker; she was an inspirational speaker.
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.
I do feel sorry for the Prince of Wales, waiting and waiting, while his mother looks better and better. She's not staying on because of any concern about his abilities as a king. The Queen simply feels she must do her duty, and she's never even contemplated abdication.
My mother was independent. She had grown up in Dalton and Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts, and she was one of the first women drivers in that area.
I think Buffy was a grown-up. One of the amazing things about the show was that I was able to grow with her. Yes, she started in high school, and then she went to college, and then essentially she was a mother to all the other Slayers, so I always felt like Buffy was a grown-up.
I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.
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