"Mothering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had caught and held him. For the first time he had mothering and love. Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern to which he meant to conform. He was happy ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... house where all were good To me, God knows, deserving no such thing: Comforting smell breathed at very entering, Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood. That cordial air made those kind people a hood All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing Will, or mild nights the new morsels of spring: Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... flock dotted itself over the hillside in the sunset, Sims watched what was to him the most beautiful thing in the world. The sounds were several—the mothering mutter of the ewes, the sharp blat of some lamb skipping for dinner, the plaintive cries of the "grannies"—wethers who, through some perverted maternal instinct, seek to mother some stray lamb as their own—and the deeper, contented throating ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... a lot of mothering," said Skippy with a far-off look in his eyes. "But remember, old dear, that's why we're here. That's why the ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... 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 ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... battalion headquarters, and by means of message bags dropped over brigade headquarters report progress to the staff. If, later, a further advance be made, the low-flying contact machines again play their part of mothering the infantry. ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... Outside Inn, and looked confidingly up into hers. For the first time in her life her maternal ardor—the instinct which made her yearn to nourish and minister to a race—had concentrated on a single human being. Sheila, hungry for mothering, had turned to her with the simplicity of the people among whom she had been brought up, taking her sympathetic response as a matter of course; and the two were soon on the closest, most ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... take something for it." The mothering instinct sprang to the rescue. "How much rest did you ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the sound of her footsteps ceased than David threw off his armor of self-restraint and burst into a passion of sobs, the wilder for their long repression. He didn't hear the patter of little feet on the floor, and not until two mothering arms were about his neck did he see the ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... forget the fact that she would not be able to earn anything in future. Didn't she do her full share of the work by mothering the baby? Wasn't that as good as money? Money was, rightly understood, nothing but work. Therefore she paid her share ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... unbuttoned him. Always, since he was a little, breathing soul, it had been Sheelah. It had never occurred to him that he loved Sheelah, but he was used to her. All the mothering he had ever experienced had been the Sheelah kind—thorough enough, but lacking something; Murray was conscious that it lacked something. Perhaps—perhaps to-night he should find out what. For to-night not Sheelah, but his mother, ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... realization and closer contact between mother and child. The familiar term, 'God could not be everywhere so He made mothers' has its modern scientific application, as no amount of education and care given to children in school or elsewhere outside the home can take the place of mothering in the home. 'The home exists for the child, hence the child's ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... 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" will not satisfy. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... one, God bless you and forgive us all," sobbed Mrs. Haines as Polly was caught in her mothering embrace. "And you—you had to come all the way from New York to save her," she added, turning ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... light had not seen the mothering darkness hid tenderly. Two bright tear-drops, filling tired eyes that had tried so often to fool themselves ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... children had a great desire to see the procession in the Mid- Lent week. It is after what we call Mothering Sunday—when the prettiest little boy they can find in Paris rides through the streets on the largest white ox. Now the lodgings whither Sir Francis and Lady Ommaney had betaken themselves, when my ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in a wonderful glow of shame and happiness and pride that must have made the surrounding roses very hopelessly jealous. A quaint mothering look, sacred, divine, Madonna-like, woke in her great eyes as she thought—remorsefully—of how unhappy Billy must be at that very moment and of how big he was and of his general niceness; and she desired, very heartily, that this fleshy young man would make his scene and have done with ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... like to die. I think ours was what would be called homoeopathic practice now-a-days. Then we learnt to make all the cakes and dishes of the season in the still-room. We had plum-porridge and mince-pies at Christmas, fritters and pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, furmenty on Mothering Sunday, violet-cakes in Passion Week, tansy-pudding on Easter Sunday, three-cornered cakes on Trinity Sunday, and so on through the year: all made from good old Church receipts, handed down from one of my lady's earliest Protestant ancestresses. ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Poe!... Mr. Truelord has not yet been roused. No one will wake him unless you choose to do it yourself by increasing the hubbub. Roger defends you to Mrs. Truelord—says you are ill—out of your senses—and other complimentary things. Both of them are soothing and mothering Helen, and—(dropping into tenderness) I wanted you to have a ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... just wanted a good mothering," said Mrs. Stanton to Ulyth. "It is marvellous how fast she is improving. You'll make something of your little wild bird after ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... miraculous are not to be sought afar off, but are here and now; and that love of the earth-mother is, in the truest sense, love of the divine: "The babe in the womb is not nearer its mother than are we to the invisible, sustaining, mothering powers of the universe, and to its spiritual entities, every moment of our lives." One who speaks thus of the things of such import to every human soul is bound to win responses; he deals with things that come home to us all. We ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... illusions. He was mercenary—the fault of his training, I dare say—but he had that man-call I spoke about. It's really a woman-call. He was weak, worthless, full of faults, mean in small things, but he had an attraction and it was impossible to resist mothering him. Other women felt it and yielded to it, so finally we went our separate ways. I've seen nothing of him for some time now, but he keeps in touch with me and—I've sent him a good deal of money. When he learns that I have prospered in a big way ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... enervating, hot-house concentration on them of an unbalanced, undeveloped woman, who has let everything else in her personality atrophy except her morbid preoccupation with her own offspring. That's really the meaning of what's sentimentally called 'mothering.' Probably it would be the best thing in the world for the Powers children if their mother ran away with that fine broth of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... 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 ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... Perhaps they would have succeeded better if they had turned away from their own imaginations to some mother in real life, who has loved and worked and suffered like this one. The face answers in part our first question. A woman like this is capable of mothering great sons. Industrious, patient, self-sacrificing, she would spare herself nothing to train them faithfully. And the life of which her face speaks—a life of self-denying toil, ennobled by high ideals of duty—is the stuff ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... up the counter-accusation to-morrow. Now I'm tired and I'm going to bed. If I may insult you by mothering you, so should you. You look tired and I've seldom ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... 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, drew his robes closely about him and scowled at ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... a dejected canary perched on a window sill. I shinned gallantly up the side of a dead wall; just touched the canary bird with the tips of my fingers. It flew and a lady caught it triumphantly like a baseball as it came down. She went away "mothering" it. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... blooming court stiff and cold. The suddenness and the decision and the—the arrogance of the thing took 'em all ends up and had 'em speechless. She was there by Sabre and stooping over him, mothering him, before Buddha or any of 'em could have found the wits to say what his own name was. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... other; but you and I were always together at heart, and your dear letters were so transparent that I seemed to read all that was in your mind. It was partly Mrs Asplin's doing too—dear good woman, for she gave you the care and mothering which you needed to develop your character, yet never tried to take my place. Yes, indeed, we must do all we can for Esther! Find out what she would like, dear, and we will go to town together and buy the best of its kind. I can never do enough ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... Susy's voice pealed out in a merry, piping laugh—because she had put her small finger into her cookie and pulled out a fat round currant! And something in the laugh touched the spark to the mothering instinct strong in Robin's young heart—the mothering instinct that had caused her bitter anguish over Cynthia's loss, that had taught her how to care for her Jimmie, and had given her strength to run away from her Jimmie that he might have his "chance." She forgot the dirty surroundings, ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... America, by the eternal God of heaven, there can be no division of destiny on the same soil and in the bosom and in the lap of the same natural mother. Men may attempt and accomplish discrimination in a small way, but Almighty God and all-mothering nature are absolutely impartial. They have woven the fabric of life so that the thread of each man's existence is a part of the whole. He who sets fire to his neighbor's house, endangers the existence of ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... Mothering was not in my stock of memories. The heart-hunger of the orphan child had been eased by the gentleness of Jondo, the championship of Mat Nivers, and the sure defense of Esmond Clarenden, who said little to children, and was instinctively trusted by ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... confirmed in these suspicions. He was most dear to her when he returned in an under-mood of distress. She knew then that she was necessary; to be necessary was the passion of her heart. Then she would become gay and tender and mothering—an altogether sweeter, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... prose-memoir, and left capital examples of it; made attempts at the prose history; ventured upon much and performed no little in the vernacular drama; besides the vast performance, sometimes inspired from elsewhere but never as literature copied, which we have already seen, in her fostering if not mothering of Romance. When a learned and enthusiastic Icelander speaks of his patrimony in letters as "a native literature which, in originality, richness, historical and artistic worth, stands unrivalled in modern Europe," we can admire ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... These may be set down in general as occurring in the field of emotional susceptibility. Thorndike traces them back to the varying intensity of two human traits earlier discussed: the fighting instinct, relatively much stronger in the male, and the nursing or mothering instinct, much stronger in the female. With this fact are associated important differences in the conduct of men and women in social relations. The maternal instinct is held by some writers, for instance, to be in large measure the basis of altruism, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... considered that here was another person to wait on her. As to keeping him clean and making clothes for him, they might as well have expected her to train the sledge dogs. She made him serve her, but for mothering he had to go to Madame Cadotte. Yet Archange far outweighed Madame Cadotte with him. The labors put upon him by the autocrat of the house were sweeter than mococks full of maple sugar from the hand of the Chippewa housekeeper. At first ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... her mothering, knowing way. Then she opened the door, there to find a deputy from the ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... and overawe the girls by shaking my Speaker great-uncle in their faces. And so in hospital; it would flash across me sometimes in a plaintive sort of way that they couldn't know that I was Miss Boyce of Mellor, and had been mothering and ruling the whole of my father's village—or they wouldn't treat me so. Mercifully I held my tongue. But one day it came to a crisis. I had had to get things ready for an operation, and had done very well. Dr. Marshall had paid me even a little compliment all to myself. But then afterwards ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... saw you watching us yesterday after the rehearsal! You saw I was flirting, and I know you imagined all sorts of horrid things. Our little flirtations are not what you think. When we flirt we play at love-making with our best boys, just as once upon a time we played at mothering ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... to her a little bit old-fashioned. Some of the grown-up daughters, the ones who had not been in college, she liked a little better. Nevertheless, Kathryn's attempts at closest comradeship were with certain of the young instructors. She told herself that she was mothering them, giving their homeless selves an outlook on domestic life. What the young instructors told, would be better for the editing. Indeed, it was somewhat edited and pruned of its finest flowers of speech, out of loyalty to Brenton whom they one and ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... obligations. "Noblesse oblige;" you can not lay it down. "More are the children of the desolate than of her who hath a husband." All the little children that are born must look to womanhood somewhere for mothering. Do they all get it? All the works and policies of men look back somewhere for a true "desire" toward and by which only they can rule. Is the desire of the woman—of the home, the mother-motive of the world and human living—kept in the integrity and ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... mother: and that touched Sidonie: she would put herself in Louisa's place, alone in Germany: and she had a maternal feeling for Christophe, and when he talked to her he tried to trick his need of mothering and love, from which a man suffers most when he is weak and ill. He felt nearer Louisa with Sidonie than with anybody else. Sometimes he would confide his artistic troubles to her. She would pity him gently, though she seemed ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... woman. "You a mother? Why, you poor little mite, you look as if you wanted a deal of mothering yourself." ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... got up, sat on the arm of his own chair next to hers and put his arms about her, bending over her, mothering her. Her distress was so great that he said as earnestly ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... better than step-mothering," said the rector, "so far as my experience goes. Men, my dear, are not so exacting; they ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... head. "Try, if you like, but she won't go. She's more 'mommerish' than ever just now, poor baby. She needs mothering, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... These competitions in unselfishness between Pamela and Frances Carr always bored her. There was no end to them. Women are so terrifically self-abnegatory; they must give, give, give, to someone all the time. Women, that is, of the mothering type, such as these. They must be forever cherishing something, sending someone to bed with bread and milk, guarding ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... female child, it will be understood—and is the first sign 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 child grows up nursing this image of itself, whether with or without a wax face, blue eyes and tow- ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... turned to him and found what had appeared so hard was quite easy, for she discerned some unusual trouble in his mind, and was woman enough for the mothering instinct to sweep up over ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... with which he was unfamiliar. They could have talked by signs a little. That would have been better than nothing. Too, he would have been glad to see her face. What he had glimpsed assured him that she was pretty; but her strongest appeal to him lay in the affectionate nature revealed by her gentle mothering of the grotesque doll. ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... boy!" Polly was mothering Joel now, just as Mamsie would have done; and Tom looking on with all his eyes, as he thought of his own home, with neither mother nor sister, didn't hear Jasper at first. So ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... 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 of the larger forms of animal life seems inevitable ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... irrepressible note of youth about him, which called forth a species of "mothering" from every woman of his acquaintance, Alan Stair was a man to whom people instinctively turned for counsel. A child in the material things of this world, he was a giant in spiritual development—broad-minded and tolerant, his religion spiced with a sense of humour and ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... home. As well might one demand what I would give in the place of smallpox if I were able to eradicate it. I am not concerned to find a substitute for such perversion of sex activity. If men and women choose to live together in freedom, fathering and mothering their children according to a rule grown out of freedom, and directed by expediency, I fancy they would be, at least, as happy as they can be now, tied together by a hard, unpleasant knot. And if an economically free woman chose to have six children by six ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... as brown things that mimic their mothering earth, Green creeping things that the grass lifts to the sun, Out of its wrongs the City had brought to the birth The shape of ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... and reclining in an arm-chair placed as closely to a large wood fire as was possible. He was very ill indeed, poor man, and she uttered an exclamation when she saw his wan cheeks and hollow eyes. Lambert was now as weak as he had been strong, and with the mothering instinct of a woman, she rushed forward to kneel ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... the man before 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 of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... hours of quiet have been spent within the walls of the ancient capital, and no one can know England until the spirit of the English countryside, the secluded and primary village of the byways with its mothering church, rich with the best of the past, has been studied, known and loved. This is the essential England for which the yeoman of England, whose memorials will be seen in almost every Wessex hamlet, have given ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... her have her way. She brought out the clothes our own child had worn and dressed the waif in them, rubbing his chilled limbs, brushing his wet hair, laughing over him, mothering him. She seemed like her ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... about it, he wouldn't know what to do. Besides, he said it was worth a lot to run a couple of rough-necks like Les and me, and he'd make the salary all right so you could afford to leave whatever you were doing and just give your time to mothering us. Now it's up to you, Cloudy Jewel, to help us out with our proposition or spoil everything, because we simply won't have a housekeeper, and we don't know another real mother in the whole world that hasn't a family of ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill |
