"They put him on my chest for a minute and I simply did not believe he was mine. Then I got hungry.  I had a little boy, and now all I really wanted to do was eat."
-JOAN BAEZ
"After [the baby] was born, I remembered thinking that no one had ever told me how much I would love my child."
-NORA EPHRON
"There aren't words yet invented to define the emotions a mother feels as she cuddles her newborn child."
-JANET LEIGH
"I remember leaving the hospital thinking, "Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him?  I don't know beans about babies!  I don't have a license to do this.  [We're] just amateurs."
-ANNE TYLER
"Such solicitous care I have never had.  Chairs pulled out for me, things picked up for me, milk offered me, an arm offered for high steps...at first it bothered me;  now I think it rather a relief--sometimes very funny and sometimes very nice."
-ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
"While you can quarrel with a grownup, how can you quarrel with a newborn baby who has stretched out his little arms for you to pick it up?"
-MARIA VON TRAPP
"When a child enters the world through you, it alters everything on a psychic, psychological and purely practical level."
-JANE FONDA
"I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it."
-ROSE KENNEDY
"The darn trouble with cleaning the house is it gets dirty the next day anyway, so skip a week if you have to.  The children are the most important thing."
-BARBARA BUSH
"Does it seem impossible that the child will grow up?  That the bashful smile will become a bold expression...that a briefcase will replace the blue security blanket?"
-ANNE BEATTIE
"I love being a mother...I am more aware.  I feel things on a deeper level.  I have a kind of understanding about my body, about being a woman."
-SHELLEY LONG
"Seeing you sleeping peacefully on your back among your stuffed ducks, bears and basset hounds would remind me that no matter how good the next day might be, certain moments were gone forever."
-JOAN BAEZ
"All the earth, though it were full of kind hearts, is but a desolation and a desert place to a mother when her only child is absent."
-ELIZABETH GASKELL
"Being a mother, as far as I can tell, is a constantly evolving process of adapting to the needs of your child while changing and growing as a person in your own right."
-DEBORAH INSEL
"To love the tender heart hath ever fled, as on its mother's breast the infant throws its sobbing face, and there in sleep forgets its woe."
-MARY TIGHE
"Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you, what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching."
-FRAN LEBOWITZ
"The mother is the most precious possession of the nation, so precious that society advances its highest well-being when it protects the functions of the mother."
-ELLEN KEY
"I was not a classic mother.  But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school.  So, I didn't bake cookies.  You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love."
-RAQUEL WELCH
"My idea of a superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors."
-BETTE MIDLER
"You have a wonderful child.  Then, when he's 13, gremlins carry him away and leave in his place a stranger who gives you not a moment's peace.  The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears; they cannot utter the one, nor will they utter the other."
-FRANCIS BACON
"You are the bows from which your children are as living arrows sent forth. I fold the drab maternity pants with the frayed elastic waistband and place them back in the box.  Then I put the box away--for now."
-CAROL KORT
"...Every mother of more than one child has a secret favorite, so secret that she might go through her whole life and never admit to herself which one it was.  Sometimes it takes a crisis, something out of the ordinary, to make her realize her  preference."
-GAIL GODWIN
"The third baby is the easiest...You know, for instance, how you're going to look in a maternity dress about the seventh month, and you know how to release the foot brake on a baby carriage without fumbling amateurishly."
-SHIRLEY JACKSON
"Were women meant to do everything--work and have babies?"
-CANDICE BERGEN
"I think we're seeing in working mothers a change from "Thank God It's Friday" to "Thank God It's Monday."  If any working mother has not experienced that feeling, her children were not adolescent."
-ANN DIEHL
"A successful career means nothing without a personal life.  So, the children were always with me."
-JANET LEIGH
"One of my children wrote in a third grade piece on how her mother spent her time..."one-half time on home, one-half time on outsider things, one-half time on writing."
-CHARLOTTE MONTGOMERY
"If motherhood is an occupation which is critically important to society the way we say it is, then there should be a mother's bill of rights."
-BARBARA ANN MIKULSKI
"When people ask me what I do, I always say I am a mother first.  Your children represent your thoughts.  Your children are a statement."
-JACQUELINE JACKSON
"Our children are not going to be just "our children"--they are going to be other people's husbands and wives and the parents of our grandchildren."
-MARY S. CALDERONE
"Children are likely to live up to  what you believe of them."
-LADY BIRD JOHNSON
