A Quote by Ruth Reichl

What was so extraordinary to me about going through this box of my mother's letters and diaries was meeting my mother not as my mother, but as a real person. And what breaks my heart is that I had no idea how self-aware she was and how protective of me she was.
The idea of the book ["The Japanese Lover"] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing.
When my mother read 'The Joy Luck Club', she was always complaining to me how she had to tell her friends that, no, she was not the mother or any of the mothers in the book.
India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.
My mother was a very absent mother. She was going out, she was drinking a lot, she liked to have fun. It's fine with me. I have no bitterness about it. When I was 3, she went to America for months. I never had any problems with that. I even liked it.
...fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me? (140)
A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother. She was an unhappy wife. She had never known what it was to be a good mother. She didn't have a good mother of her own. And so there's a kind of parenting that doesn't happen.
I'm certainly not a perfect mother, but I'm trying to be what my mother wasn't for me. My mother's battled depression, so I understand it now as a parent, some of the things that she must have been going through.
My mother is a very fun-loving person. She has been through a lot in her life. She has had a couple of divorces. When I was in high school she was a single mother. That's when I learned to do my own laundry.
I would ask my mother to show me how to walk - and she did show me. That's why I think it's funny when people say, 'Did so-and-so teach you how to walk?' And I always say, 'You must be talking about my mother, because it was my mother who taught me how to walk.'
My mother, Mary, has been a guiding force for as long as I can remember through the examples she's set as a single mother. She demonstrated her confidence and faith in me by investing everything in me and the business at a time when she had just lost everything.
My first banjo? My mother's sister, my aunt, lived about a mile from where we did, and she raised some hogs. And she had - her - the hog - the mother - they called the mother a sow - of a hog. And she had some pigs. Well, the pigs were real pretty, and I was going to high school and I was taking agriculture in school. And I sort of got a notion that I'd like to do that, raise some hogs. And so my aunt had this old banjo, and my mother told me, said, which do you want, the pig or a banjo? And each one of them's $5 each. I said, I'll just take the banjo.
There are a lot of sacrifices a mother makes when she's raising a child by herself. I saw it when I was growing up, watching all my mother did for me. But it wasn't until recently that I fully understood the price she paid because of how we had to struggle.
My mother is from another time - the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that's what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn't know what I'm talking about. I know if I wasn't her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.
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.
My mother was a single working mother; she started having children very young. There was a tension inside her about who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do and how she couldn’t achieve the things she wanted to.
My mother was a single working mother; she started having children very young. There was a tension inside her about who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do and how she couldn't achieve the things she wanted to.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!