A Quote by Shirley Ballas

The first thing I do in the morning is pick up my cell phone and call my mother to check that she's ok, and the first thing I do in the evening is call my mother to see how she's doing, and my son to see how his day went.
Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.
My mother had very poor hearing for many years, until she went basically into - I guess I would call it a psychotic break. She was OK one day, and the next day she was completely cuckoo, violent, paranoid.
I can be at my house sitting there making music alone, and every single time I've ever done that the first thing I do when I'm done, no matter if it's 4 in the morning... I literally just pick up my phone and I call someone.
It's a knack that my mother doesn't have. The only audiobook she ever did she had to leave after the first day, because she couldn't string two sentences together. It's about the only thing she can't do.
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.
But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud.
The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.
My mother's very proud of the name she gave me. She thought it sounded rhythmically better. It doesn't really make a difference to me what people call me, but since my mother calls me Holly Marie when she's angry, I prefer just my first name.
I'll call you," he repeated. "If you call me, I won't pick up the phone." "You will wait by the phone for my call, and when it rings, you will pick it up and you will speak to me in a civil manner. If you don't know how, ask someone.
My mother - my stepmother, really, she herself have been what they call an elocutionist. And she was the one who first encouraged me to write poetry, because she used to read it to us. And then when I began to write when I was nine years old, my first poem was published in the Amsterdam News. I called it "The Graveyard."
I had become so insulated in my world as a mother that I didn't know how to pick up the phone and call anybody to put myself out there. I don't live my life anymore that way.
So your strength is failing you? Why don't you tell your mother about it? ... Mother! Call her with a loud voice. She is listening to you; she sees you in danger, perhaps, and she-your holy mother Mary-offers you, along with the grace of her son, the refuge of her arms, the tenderness of her embrace ... and you will find yourself with added strength for the new battle.
My mother was not what anyone would call sweet, and she wasn't conventional. When my brother couldn't find his shoes one morning, she said, 'Oh, for God's sake, it won't kill him not to have shoes for a day,' and sent him to school without them.
She is fragile, she is soft, she is weaker, she is afraid. All around is a man-created world, and she is a stranger in it. She needs security. So when she falls in love, the first concept, the first idea, is how to be secure, safe. She would not like to make love to a man unless marriage is settled. Marriage has to be the first thing, then anything else can follow.
When I was younger, I didn't understand how a mother could put her son on a plane and just say, you know, 'Here you go, I'll see you later.' And she never followed, she never came.
My mother wanted to be a mother. That's the only thing she wanted from the bottom of her heart. She didn't want to be the number one actress - which she was - and she didn't want to be this great legend. All she wanted to be was a mother and she did but God took her away. So I always will empathise and sympathise with women.
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