Daughters Quotes (125 Quotes)

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  “My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”

  Jodi Picoult

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  “As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beating of my heart. I cannot now imagine a life without her.”

  Kristin Hannah

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• “To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”

  Christopher Hitchens

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  “What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.”

  Jodi Picoult

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  “I don't need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk.”

  L.J. Smith

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  “Daddy," I whispered, feeling my own breath hitch in my throat. "I love you."
  Just when I was sure he was asleep, the one corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. "I knew that," he murmured. "Always knew that.”

  Morgan Matson

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  “Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.”

  Shannon L. Alder

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  “It's not always easy being her daughter.'
  
  I think,' she said, 'sometimes it's hard no matter whose daughter you are.”

  Sarah Dessen

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  “Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”

  Simone de Beauvoir

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• “And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.”

  Amy Tan

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  “A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.”

  Sarah Ruhl

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• “MY MOTHER GETS DRESSED
  
  It is impossible for my mother to do even
  the simplest things for herself anymore
  so we do it together,
  get her dressed.
  
  I choose the clothes without
  zippers or buckles or straps,
  clothes that are simple
  but elegant, and easy to get into.
  
  Otherwise, it's just like every other day.
  After bathing, getting dressed.
  The stockings go on first.
  This time, it's the new ones,
  
  the special ones with opaque black triangles
  that she's never worn before,
  bought just two weeks ago
  at her favorite department store.
  
  We start with the heavy, careful stuff of the right toes
  into the stocking tip
  then a smooth yank past the knob of her ankle
  and over her cool, smooth calf
  
  then the other toe
  cool ankle, smooth calf
  up the legs
  and the pantyhose is coaxed to her waist.
  
  You're doing great, Mom,
  I tell her
  as we ease her body
  against mine, rest her whole weight against me
  
  to slide her black dress
  with the black empire collar
  over her head
  struggle her fingers through the dark tunnel of the sleeve.
  
  I reach from the outside
  deep into the dark for her hand,
  grasp where I can't see for her touch.
  You've got to help me a little here, Mom
  
  I tell her
  then her fingertips touch mine
  and we work her fingers through the sleeve's mouth
  together, then we rest, her weight against me
  
  before threading the other fingers, wrist, forearm, elbow, bicep
  and now over the head.
  I gentle the black dress over her breasts,
  thighs, bring her makeup to her,
  
  put some color on her skin.
  Green for her eyes.
  Coral for her lips.
  I get her black hat.
  
  She's ready for her company.
  I tell the two women in simple, elegant suits
  waiting outside the bedroom, come in.
  They tell me, She's beautiful.
  
  Yes, she is, I tell them.
  I leave as they carefully
  zip her into
  the black body bag.
  
  Three days later,
  I dream a large, green
  suitcase arrives.
  When I unzip it,
  
  my mother is inside.
  Her dress matches
  her eyeshadow, which matches
  the suitcase
  
  perfectly. She's wearing
  coral lipstick.
  "I'm here," she says, smiling delightedly, waving
  and I wake up.
  
  Four days later, she comes home
  in a plastic black box
  that is heavier than it looks.
  In the middle of a meadow,
  
  I learn a naked
  more than naked.
  I learn a new way to hug
  as I tighten my fist
  
  around her body,
  my hand filled with her ashes
  and the small stones of bones.
  I squeeze her tight
  
  then open my hand
  and release her
  into the smallest, hottest sun,
  a dandelion screaming yellow at the sky.”

  Daphne Gottlieb

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  “She was a monster, but she was my monster.”

  Jeanette Winterson

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  “Young girls are like helpless children in the hands of amorous men, whatever is said to them is true and whatever manipulation on their bodies seems like love to them, sooner or later, they come back to their senses, but the scars are not dead inasmuch as her spoiler lives.”

  Michael Bassey Johnson

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  “Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”

  Milan Kundera

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  “Teach your daughters their battle cries are needed far more than their silence and hear them deafen the world with their fearlessness.”

  Nikita Gill

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• “I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.”

  Elizabeth Berg

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  “No, I am never setting foot in this house again it scares me and makes me sad and I wish you could be a mom whose eyes worked but I don't think you can.”

  Laurie Halse Anderson

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  “We gotta start teaching our daughters to be somebodies instead of somebody's.”

  Kifah Shah

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  “Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.”

  Alice Hoffman

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  “I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. She tended to me. She administrated me.”

  Gillian Flynn

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  “She still remembered sitting for hours as a little girl and pretending to be a hassock. A foot stool. Because if she could just stay very small, and very quiet, her mother would forget she was there, and then she wouldn't scream about people and places and things that had gone wrong.”

  Eloisa James

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  “I hope our daughters are born with so much fire in their souls, they could put volcanoes and stars to shame.”

  Nikita Gill

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• “She serves me a piece of it a few minutes
  out of the oven. A little steam rises
  from the slits on top. Sugar and spice -
  cinnamon - burned into the crust.
  But she's wearing these dark glasses
  in the kitchen at ten o'clock
  in the morning - everything nice -
  as she watches me break off
  a piece, bring it to my mouth,
  and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen,
  in winter. I fork the pie in
  and tell myself to stay out of it.
  She says she loves him. No way
  could it be worse.”

  Raymond Carver

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  “The people that truly love us in life don't fight for us to remain a doormat for others.”

  Shannon L. Alder

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