My mother had a great vinyl collection, and she was constantly playing female singer-songwriters. I first learned about classic song structures by listening to them, and Laura Nyro particularly stood out. Her voice was outside what you'd usually hear on the radio; that really appealed to me.
‐‐ Jenny Lewis
My mother had a great voice. Not like mine, not like my sister's, not like my son's - a high soprano voice, but like a bird. I mean, really beautiful.
‐‐ Barbra Streisand
My mother had a horrific life. At fourteen, she was in the Nazi concentration camps. Her sense about life now is, every day above ground is a good day.
‐‐ Gene Simmons
My mother had a lot of parties when I was a child. There'd always be a moment when she would place me on the upright piano and have me sing Somewhere 'Over the Rainbow'.
‐‐ Rufus Wainwright
My mother had a lot of phobias. She's pregnant with me and she was a very phobic person. So I was born into phobia, basically.
‐‐ Dane Cook
My mother had a marvelous talent for mishandling money - mine.
‐‐ Judy Garland
My mother had a master's degree and had been a schoolteacher before she started having kids at 30. But my father's family were landowners, farmer-merchants. Moneymaking was extremely important, like one of those semi-rapacious families in Lillian Hellman, where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
‐‐ Allan Gurganus
My mother had a premonition and she felt that hairdressing would be very very good for me.
‐‐ Vidal Sassoon
My mother had a radio show - a Barbara Walters type of gal and was very successful for about 20-some years on a radio station.
‐‐ Jonathan Winters
My mother had a rule, obviously, that I couldn't go across the street by myself, but I had to find a way of doing it.
‐‐ Stevie Wonder
My mother had a saying: 'Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last.'
‐‐ Kamala Harris
My mother had a sewing machine. I was never allowed to use it, but I was so fascinated by this little needle going up and down joining fabric together that I'd use it when my mother went out to feed the chickens.
‐‐ Philip Treacy
My mother had a son from previous marriage and her husband died in Second World War.
‐‐ Mikhail Baryshnikov
My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
‐‐ Amy Tan
My mother had all these maxims - like, classy girls never chew gum, never read comic books, never get their ears pierced, never get their hair dyed.
‐‐ Jennifer Tilly
My mother had always taught me to write about my feelings instead of sharing really personal things with others, so I spent many evenings writing in my diary, eating everything in the kitchen and waiting for Mr. Wrong to call.
‐‐ Cathy Guisewite
My mother had Alzheimer's, and it's a desperately, desperately cruel thing to witness.
‐‐ Gemma Jones
My mother had an illegal abortion in 1960, which was the year the birth control pill came out, but I guess a little late for her, but - and I never knew. I found out when my father, after her death, got her FBI file.
‐‐ Katha Pollitt
My mother had an incredibly strong accent - although I couldn't hear it - and she was the main person there, so I'll have learnt to speak English from her.
‐‐ John Key
My mother had been a country and western singer but when she moved out to Hollywood found it very difficult to get work so when I was born they put me into dance classes and singing classes as soon as I could walk actually.
‐‐ Morgan Brittany
My mother had been a grade-school teacher, and my father had an eighth-grade education.
‐‐ Gordon Bell
My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.
‐‐ Jean Fritz
My mother had been a solitary chef. It was her recreation and her escape.
‐‐ Janet Fitch
My mother had been an actress and we came from that world in New York, the theater world and the downtown sort of theater scene, and so I guess we didn't really have what you'd call like a Hollywood kind of life at all.
‐‐ Martha Plimpton
My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.
‐‐ Sanjeev Bhaskar
My mother had been blind as a child. And so, blindness was something that has long fascinated me, but also it's something I find really, really scary.
‐‐ Marie Rutkoski
My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.
‐‐ Guillermo Cabrera Infante
My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.
‐‐ Alice Walker
My mother had early-onset Alzheimer's, and it took her four years to die. She was only 44; I was 14.
‐‐ Karolyn Grimes
My mother had faith in me, had more faith in me than I had in myself, and knowing that she did made me try to find faith. She believed in trying things.
‐‐ Rosemary Mahoney
My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered.
‐‐ Gene Kelly
My mother had heard the story of Hannah and Samuel, so she prayed that if God would give her a son, she would give that son to God. That was a perfectly appropriate thing for her to do, but as I observe, she did not have to tell me she had made such a promise. In particular, she did not have to tell me when I was six.
‐‐ Stanley Hauerwas
My mother had introduced me to a lot of my father's friends because she believed that I would get to know the guy my dad was better through his friends than just in the hospital visits.
‐‐ Arlo Guthrie
My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.
‐‐ Lauren Graham
My mother had lots and lots of children who didn't survive.
‐‐ Dom DeLuise
My mother had me when she was 15. My father died before I was born. So my mother was a teenage widow, and she used herself as her greatest example so I wouldn't end up in her position.
‐‐ Gabriel Luna
My mother had morning sickness after I was born.
‐‐ Rodney Dangerfield
My mother had multiple sclerosis.
‐‐ Ruth Rendell
My mother had never had a day's illness in her life and never thought to have checks. Then, at 78, she discovered she had breast cancer and passed away the next year. But if she'd had a check two years before, they could have done something about it, they could have saved her.
‐‐ Rick Wakeman
My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.
‐‐ Patti Smith
My mother had no idea that her daughter would turn out to be a writer, but she would not let me go through a day of my childhood without music.
‐‐ Virginia Euwer Wolff
My mother had seven children in seven years. No twins. She also had a three-legged beagle who was compelled to bite strangers, a freakishly big double-pawed tomcat who regularly left dead rabbits on the front doorstep, and 70 white mice that one or another of us had smuggled home from my father's research laboratory.
‐‐ Rosemary Mahoney
My mother had taken me to photographer Paul Hesse, who used some of my pictures on magazine covers.
‐‐ Margaret O'Brien
My mother had taught me about the importance of finding a 'good provider,' so when my boyfriend proposed, I said 'yes' in a heartbeat. I was still just a kid, and I didn't know what was coming in life.
‐‐ Elizabeth Warren
My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn't trust life insurance salesmen.
‐‐ Sylvia Plath
My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty cents that the adults had to pay.
‐‐ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
My mother had to stop me reading to make me go and get some fresh air. I used to get so annoyed. She actually had to sit on my book because, otherwise, I would find it.
‐‐ Michelle Paver
My mother had very humble beginnings - to put it mildly. Her dad built their home out of timber that he cut down on their land. No heat, no air-conditioning - 'no foolishness,' as he would call it.
‐‐ Blake Lively
My mother handed down all these amazing scarves from the sixties and seventies, and I have a hundred of them.
‐‐ Kelly Wearstler