Happy Early Mother's Day!

I know that I’m jumping onto the Mother’s Day bandwagon early, but I won’t get to post again until after Sunday and I wanted to send happy wishes to everyone who celebrates this special day in some way. Not everyone is a mother, but everyone has one, or someone like one, somewhere. Typically, Mother’s Day for me is a bit tough, having lost my mother some years ago; however, I try to think happy thoughts and enjoy the memories that come flooding back as I watch the hustle and bustle at restaurants and stores on Mother's Day.

Like many writers, I was lucky enough to have a mother who read to me when I was younger, and later we read books together sitting at our kitchen table. Also like many writers, my mother was my biggest fan. Anything I wrote, she would read. She encouraged me in all of my artistic endeavors even though she knew that a job in the arts isn't necessarily one of those professions that guarantees a living wage. She never discouraged me, though, and always wanted to read more of my writing. It is because of her I continue to put pen to page (or fingers to keyboard as it were).

In honor of mothers everywhere, especially the mothers of writers who continue to support their literary offspring with their tireless love and weary eyes outfitted in extra-strength reading glasses, I'm posting some quotes about mothers by writers that I've culled from a variety of sites around the Web. I don't know how accurate the attributions are, but it's the meaning of the words that is significant (of course, they're from writers!). I hope you enjoy them, and if you have a quote to share, please do post it as a comment.

Happy Mother's Day!

"God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers."-Rudyard Kipling

"Motherhood: All love begins and ends there."-Robert Browning

"Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavour by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts." - Washington Irving

"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not." - James Joyce

"Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children." - William Makepeace Thackeray

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his." - Oscar Wilde

“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother.  A child is a child.  They get bigger, older, but grown?  What’s that suppose to mean?  In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”-Toni Morrison

“And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see — or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.”-Alice Walker

“Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.”-Pearl S. Buck

"I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars."-E.M. Forster

“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”-Zora Neale Hurston

“Because I feel that in the heavens above/The angels, whispering one to another/Can find among their burning tears of love/None so devotional as that of “Mother"/Therefore, by that dear name I have long called you/You who are more than mother unto me.”-Edgar Allan Poe