"Mothering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... 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 those ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... The girls 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 ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... the Green Park, which was a favourite haunt of the colonel's. He loved to sit on a chair by the side of the lake, watching the children sailing their boats and the ducks mothering their broods. He was silent. His eyes were bent upon the efforts of a small boy to bring a little waterlogged boat to a level keel and apparently he had no ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... heads of the chattering crowd in the car and met Mrs. Clyde's amused eye. "How do you like mothering a family of this ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... that he needed something a true wife should give. First, he needed to tell some one about it. He had not told me. If she had been inside his life, where she belonged, he must have told her. Second, he needed her sympathy, her mothering.... She might have been able to give him that—after a fashion.... She felt how it should be done, knew how she would have done it if only she loved him. "I could be the right kind of a wife," she said, wistfully. "I know ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... 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
... of being together are the hours of real education. Children cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... agitation, and it warmed the mothering feeling which, though still a child in heart and years his junior, she had long felt for ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... 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 mother ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "tribunes of the people," who are to act as their gratuitous legal advisers; and, when law is not sufficiently effective, the whole force of the army is to obtain what the said tribunes may conceive to be justice, by the practice of ruthless intimidation. Society, says Mr. Booth, needs "mothering"; and he sets forth, with much complacency, a variety of "cases," by which we may estimate the sort of "mothering" to be expected at his parental hands. Those who study the materials thus set before them will, I think, be driven to the conclusion that the "mother" has already proved herself a ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... great pleasure to sit with the Lump on her knee in the intervals of their work, mothering him as long as he would suffer it; and it was her privilege to take his left hand as Pollyooly led him from Soho, across the dangerous crossings to the safe stretch of the embankment from Charing-Cross to the Temple. As they went Pollyooly and ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... mental activity. 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, and is closely associated with sensitivity ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... she's ever been really appreciated at the Villa Camellia," replied Irene. "Mums likes her immensely. She says there's so much in her, and that she only wants 'mothering' to bring her out. As for Vin, his head's turned. He's made me vow faithfully to engineer that he sits next to Lorna in the boat to-day. Are you going with Stewart? Well, I've promised Michael if he's a particularly good boy I'll ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... 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 development should have ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... from the sea And folded the length of the shore In the clasp of its mothering arms As though it would shield from harms; And lulled were the loud alarms, And lost was the rage and roar Of the surge, so soothingly The mist ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... thereafter and sat with Jimmy as long as the nurse would permit her to remain. Jimmy discovered during those periods a new side to her character, a mothering tenderness that filled him with a feeling of content and happiness the moment that she entered the room, and which doubtless aided materially in his rapid convalescence, for until she had been permitted to see him Jimmy had suffered as much from mental ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... can only be served by a gift for architecture, for administration, for healing, when it occurs in the person of a male, is only a trifle less ridiculous than that other social stupidity, namely, that a gift of mothering must not be exercised except in the event of a particular man being able, under certain restrictions, to afford the opportunity. There is perhaps no social movement going on at present so deep-rooted and dramatic as this struggle of Femininity ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... physical inferiority through the early infection and unusually poor resistance to tuberculosis; one was born an imbecile; one died directly from the effects of drink; the only girl who survived early maturity, the best of them all, spent twenty years a nervous sufferer, mothering two nervously defective children; the physically best was the morally ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... Stonehenge. No one can claim to know Wessex until some 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 ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... child 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
... much of her during these last few years—exile, privations, uncongenial tasks, and the mothering of eight orphans. This last demand had been the hardest. Even to their own mother, upon whom the burden had been laid gradually and gently, in Nature's wise way, the task had been a big one; but what had it been to her, who, without ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... with a fierce wind continually blowing. Smoke 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 ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... sense, but all are called to the great, true motherhood in some of its manifold trusts and 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 beauty for which it was intrusted to her, that ...
— 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.
... and Lenox were thinking, manlike, of their own wives; and thanking God for wounds that would only let loose the woman's divine reserves of tenderness, her passion for 'mothering' the man she loves. Once during the evening they exchanged a glance of comprehension,—the freemasonry of those who love,—and the same question sprang simultaneously to their minds. "How about poor Norton? Would the news bring that wife of his back to Dera Ishmael in the last week ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... week, you pagan,' replied Sir James. 'These good folk have come a-mothering, and a share of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... so soon?' said Hester Martin, who had been unobtrusively mothering her, since Farrell left her—'When may ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were at his face, and he saw again that look in her eyes, a deep and anxious questioning behind the shimmer of love in them, something mute and understanding and wonderfully sympathetic, a mothering soul looking at him and praying as it looked. If his life had paid the forfeit the next instant, he could not have helped ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... 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, was going to undress him and ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... stroking down at the warm "bulge of blanket, so snugly enclosed in the crotch of mothering arm. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... 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 ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... she reached the roof of red-brown tiles that sloped down to the yard, Jimbo and Monkey were already far away. She strained her big green eyes in vain, seeing nothing but the tops of the plane trees, thick with tiny coming leaves, the sweep of vines and sky, and the tender, mothering night beyond. She pattered softly back again, gave a contemptuous glance at Mother in passing, and jumped up at once into the warm nest of sheets that gaped invitingly between the shoulder of Jimbo's body and the pillow. She shaped ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Something was stirring within her over which she seemed to have no control—a tenderness, a mothering instinct, a vast hurt deep within herself. She suddenly realized that she could have had him, although he had not offered himself. Nor had he ever asked for anything, probably never would. The realization singularly made him seem all the more her own. "You ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... 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 ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... old soul Mrs. Mortimer is. Do you mind any good lesson that she taught us in the cabin beyont?" I did not remember. "She said, 'The pangs of motherhood make us mothers not only of our own, but of every child that needs mothering,—especially if our own little children need us no longer. Fill their little places with ones who do need us.' Them's her very words, and it's sweet truth it is. Both my Katie and Sheridan have been grown and gone these many years and my heart ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... Sandy's wife were in the cabin when he returned at midnight. He was exhausted. Seven months in the States had softened him, he explained. He did not inquire how successful the others had been. He knew. The woman's eyes told him, the almost mothering eagerness in them when he came through the door. She had coffee and food ready for him, and he forced himself to eat. Sandy gave a report of what he had done, and Olaf smoked his pipe and tried to speak cheerfully of the splendid ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... the most sacred of all women's rights, is not one that should have any conditions attached to it except in the interests of race welfare. There are many women of admirable character, strong, capable, independent, who dislike the domestic habits of men; have no natural turn for mothering and coddling them; and find the concession of conjugal rights to any person under any conditions intolerable by their self-respect. Yet the general sense of the community recognizes in these very women the fittest people to have charge of children, and ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... 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
... 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 beauty, the handiwork of ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... if you like, but she won't go. She's more 'mommerish' than ever just now, poor baby. She needs mothering, I think—and marrying!" ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... 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 |
