"Mothering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moons. There is an ancient custom amongst the Coast tribes that when our daughters step from childhood into the great world of womanhood the occasion must be made one of extreme rejoicing. The being who possesses the possibility of someday mothering a man child, a warrior, a brave, receives much consideration in most nations, but to us, the Sunset Tribes, she is honored above all people. The parents usually give a great potlatch, and a feast that lasts many days. The entire tribe and the surrounding tribes are bidden to this festival. More ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... judgment. As a matter of fact, it was almost the other way about. She was almost dominating him. Lithe, slender, resourceful, histrionic, she was standing before him making him explain himself, only he did not see her so much in that light as in the way of a large, kindly, mothering intelligence which could see, feel, and understand. She would know how it was, he felt sure. He could make himself understood if he tried. Whatever he was or had been, she would not take a petty view. She could not. Her answers thus far ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... at the car barns until women were taken on. Men don't seem to count." Is the reproach deserved? Have women been narrow in sympathy? Perhaps we have assumed that men can look out for themselves. They could, but in private life they never do. Women have to do the mothering. A trade-unionist is ready enough to regulate wages and hours, but he gives not a thought to surroundings in ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... "Marriage and mothering," said Ann Veronica, with her mind crystallizing out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the turf. "And all the rest of it perhaps is ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... odd garments (the weekly mend), or to resuscitate one of the babies (just rescued from the reservoir). At such times I would wonder if I were somewhere near attaining to that state of experience when I should be able to appreciate your alluring phrase, "the fun of mothering an orphanage." ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... with living mothers who still need "mothering." One may work out her own youth and beauty culture while "mothering" a little one. It is worth a trial as ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... feel, and puppetry remain, Is an owned flaw in her consistency Men love to dub Dame Nature—that lay-shape They use to hang phenomena upon— Whose deftest mothering in fairest sphere Is girt about ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... curled up from the chimneys to perish against the sunny sky. Cattle left in the open crowded in the lee of the straw-stacks, their rough flanks crawling, and in the folds the ewes, yet frail from their travail, stood stung and still, mothering their weak-kneed lambs. Beside the thud of the horse's hoofs toward town there was no sound on the road save a little, dry cracking of the frost. The doctor, as he started in his carriage for Davie's house, ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... the little kid," Tessibel said meditatively, "when its ma says what another woman air a-mothering ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... always "dreamed" the Earth alive, a mothering organism to humanity; and himself, via his love of Nature, in some sweet close relation to her that other men had forgotten or ignored. Now, therefore, to hear Stahl talk of Cosmic Beings, fragments of the Soul of ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... of the flirting instinct which shows itself as early as the maternal one. This, we know, appears as soon as a child is able to stand on its feet, perhaps even before it quits the cradle. It seeks to gratify itself by mothering something, even an inanimate something, so that it is as common to put a doll in a baby- child's hands as it is to put a polished cylindrical bit of ivory—I forget the name of it—in its mouth. The ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... and Ali and said, 'God is Most Great!' Moreover, she called in his ear the call to prayer; then swathed him and gave him to his mother, who took him and put him to her breast; and he sucked his full and slept. The midwife abode with them three days, till they had made the mothering-cakes and sweetmeats; and they distributed them on the seventh day. Then they sprinkled salt[FN87] and the merchant, going in to his wife, gave her joy of her safe delivery and said, 'Where is the gift of God?' So they brought him a babe of surpassing ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... down in a wrapper to superintend the cooking. On Sundays she wore a black satin, fastened with a cameo brooch, and round her neck a long gold chain. Then her manners were lofty, and when her husband called "Mother," she answered testily, "Don't keep on mothering me." She frequently stopped him to settle his necktie or collar. All the week he wore the same short jacket; on Sundays he appeared in an ill-fitting frock-coat. His long upper lip was clean shaven, but under his chin there grew a ring of discoloured hair, neither brown nor red, but the neutral ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... in all life, is not failing in our time. As Nature grows less capable (and surely she does!) of mothering her own, then man must turn mother, as he has in the Audubon Society; as he did in the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten him, that, while extinction ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... course, since it was seventy years ago that her friendship with Mark Twain began, and her hair is gray. But her heart is young, and she finds in her work of mothering the twenty-five boys and girls in her charge the secret of defying age. On this particular afternoon she wore black and white striped silk, the effect of which was a soft gray to match her hair, and her placid face was lighted with ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... had a'most to shake out the sheets to find her,' as Josh useter say," said Rachel gravely and unhumorously ... and she told how the bereaved husband savagely fought off all his womenfolk and insisted on mothering, for a year, the baby whose birth had killed ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... with some olive oil from his tray, made a clandestine trip through the twilight of the corridor back of the elevator shaft. To avoid scandal he pretended interest in other wards, but he gravitated, as a needle to the pole, to H. And there he found the Probationer, looking rather strained, and mothering a quiet figure on ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lacked mothering, it is true, but they were governed kindly though strictly. The simple fare was wholesome and the daily round of work, study, and exercise brought the children to it with healthy appetites. It being vacation time, the schoolroom was closed. But each girl ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... farm and went away healed. Clive was a Theosophist: all men were her brothers, and all women her sisters; but those especially among art-workers who fell by the wayside might share her bread and blanket. They called her Old Mother Sphinx, because of her inscrutable eyes, and the tenderness of her mothering. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... by the fire, my dear, and get those frozen little hands warm. A bit of mothering won't hurt either of you." And Brown strode away into the kitchen with a frown between his brows. He was soon back with a small cupful of warm milk and water, a teaspoon, ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... upon the floor as a carpet, and behind flannel portieres is supposed to burn a lamp with mother ardor sufficient to keep the small fledglings warm, though orphaned. Did the week-old babies Leghorn have to be content with such mechanical mothering? Not at all! Right in the middle of the brooder sat the old Red Ally, and her huge red wings were stretched out to cover about twenty-five of the metal-born babies and part of her own fifteen, and spread in a close, but fluffy, circle around ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... little shocked, could he have learned that he ranked in her mental affections as "rather a dear boy"; for it is woman's way to claim the privilege of a motherly regard without any seniority in age, and with a good deal of feeling that mere "mothering" ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susy no sense of a missed vocation: "mothering" on a large scale would never, she perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, in odd ways, the sense of being herself mothered, of taking her first steps in the life of immaterial values which had begun to seem so much more substantial ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... it in each pathetic strenuous slow endeavour, When in mothering she unwittingly sets wounds on what she loves; Yet her primal doom pursues her, faultful, fatal is she ever; Though so deft and nigh to vision is her facile finger-touch That the seers ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... the public, the more he outpours himself, the more his need for mothering in the quiet of his home. All things are equalized, and with the strength of the sublime, spiritual nature goes the weakness of a child. Beecher was an undeveloped boy to the day ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... mining engineer employed on the island, a strong and lasting bond of friendship was established from the moment of their first meeting, when she saw him wet and cold from a hard day of loading ship through the surf and insisted on "mothering" him to the extent of seeing that he had dry clothing and other comforts. And, although the difference between the green tropic isle beyond the sunset which lay enshrined in her memory and this barren cactus-grown pile of volcanic rocks was immeasurable, yet ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... is not dependent upon the participation of grown-up persons. In practice this excessive stimulation is the common fault with which we meet. There are few children in well-to-do homes, with loving mothers and devoted nurses, who suffer from too little mothering and nursing. Too many show signs of too much. To observe the opposite fault we must seek the infants and children who for a long time are inmates of institutions, orphanages, infirmaries, hospitals, ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron |
