Mother

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

My mother insisted that I pursue music. I rented out my father's musical equipment and earned some money. As a child, I wasn't sure about a career goal, but I was always fascinated by electronic gadgets, specially musical equipment.

While my mother wanted me to be a musician, I wanted to become an electronic engineer.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.

I feel betrayed by own mother.

Shortly after I was born he emigrated to Durban, where members of my mother's family had settled at the turn of the century, and the rest of the family followed soon thereafter.

Growing up my mother played Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole in the house regularly.

My mother and my grandmother are pioneers of Mexican cuisine in this country, so I grew up in the kitchen. My mom, Zarela Martinez, was by far my biggest influence and inspiration - and toughest critic.

From a pretty early age, my mother realized that I was a little bit more gifted and talented than my own age group. So, she moved me over to play with the boys' travel soccer team when I was about 11 years old.

I believe strongly in the rights of women... my mother is a woman, my sister is a woman, my daughter is a woman, my wife is a woman.

By the grace of God, my parents were fantastic. We were a very normal family, and we have had a very middle-class Indian upbringing. We were never made to realise who we were or that my father and mother were huge stars - it was a very normal house, and I'd like my daughter to have the same thing.

Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so, but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.

When you make your first film at 47 and anybody but your mother goes to see it, to me, that's a miracle.

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap - let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges, let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs, let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.

Did I collect baseball cards? I've got 10 books full of plastic in my mother's house. All the Upper Decks, the Fleers, the Fleer Ultras. My grandfather brought me to the trade shows. I collected Marvel cards, too.

My mother pretty much raised me to be a free spirit. Anything my father would say, she would tell me, 'No, it's like this.'

The thing that I think a lot of guys need to know how to do is not take your mother's advice about honesty being the best policy. Listen to your cool, drunk uncle who tells you to lie. Those are the relationships that last.

My mother was always supportive.

My mother is really the person I learned to curse from. She discourages me from saying that in interviews. But it's true.

I'm actually half Brit and half American. I have a British father and an American mother, but as far as I'm aware, no Middle Eastern blood.

My mother is American. I first went to school in America, and we came back when I was about six to rural Norfolk. In primary school, I was teased immediately and mercilessly. I probably dropped that accent within about 10 days.

I sang a song at my sister's wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

I was raised by a mother who told me I was great every day of my life.

I've always liked older ladies, ever since my mother would have B'nai B'rith at our house.

We were called 'Three Men Who, When Standing Side by Side, Have a Wingspan of Over Twelve Feet.' We had that name for a week or so. We were also called 'Are You My Mother?' for awhile. We went through a lot of really dumb band names - almost as dumb as Fountains of Wayne.

I am half Scottish. My father is an expat from Glasgow, and on my mother's side there's a bit of French, a bit of Scottish, a bit of Irish.

When my mother tells me to do something, I'll do my own thing. A strong character can be good, but sometimes it is not good. I hope it's good in my case.

My mother's a pretty warm, open person.

My father was a lorry driver, very rarely at home. The house was run by my mother, and because there were 10 or so kids, there was no time for individual attention. It was about survival. It was about where the next meal was coming from.

My mother is not a CIA agent, but she's an Italian mother, and she'd do anything for her son.

Looking feminine is important to me. My personal style is fairly traditional. I was definitely influenced by my mother, who always looks elegant, and by Estee's classic style, she was always in Givenchy or Ungaro.

My mom has always been kind of my backbone. She keeps me strong. She is a mother, a friend. She is really everything to me.

My mother taught me that it is important to be prepared for a last-minute polish.

You could say that I am the Estee Lauder woman. I'm a working mother, time is valuable to me. I want a good product, I want quality.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

Obedience is the mother of success and is wedded to safety.

The only thing I want is to awaken all humans on the planet that we are living on Mother Earth.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

I owed it to my father that I was elected to Parliament in the first place, but I owed it to my mother that I stuck it out once I got there.

But he like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work the most do not make the most money. It was the fault of the rich, it seemed, but just how he did not know.

Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection, to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.

My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.

I had this whole ritual with my mother making the bed with me inside it so I would be invisible.

'Harry Potter' changed my life in more ways than one, and it helped me get through my mother's death.

The legs that I have made are far more perfect than the ones nature would have given me - my mother's side of the family have awful legs.

We were poor. My mother got our clothes out of the free box at the church, you know? So much of when you're a kid is about relating about what you watch on TV. And who's got these cooler shoes, and 'Let's trade lunches.' And I was just like, 'I don't have a television. I have a rock and a piece of tofu.'

It wasn't cool that I didn't comb my hair and had books and wore glasses. It was never cool be a nerd and tomboy, and these days, it really is. And I'm like, 'You guys have no idea what I went through.' How many times my mother yelled at me to comb my hair.

I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.

I've been performing since I was a child, my mother would have to pull me aside and tell me that I wasn't onstage. I was a cheerleader, president of choir, and in the school play.

My mother enjoyed acting as well with my father, who used to direct her in plays at his regiment. My sister is an excellent singer. However, it was only me who decided to pursue acting as a career.

My wife is the most wonderful woman in the world, and my parents are the most extraordinary father and mother.

I don't consult anyone - not my mother, not my father, anyone - about my work. And I must add that neither Dad nor Mom interfere in my work.

My mother would take me to Tirumala right from when I was 7 years old. I used to go along with her every time.

I didn't have a mother, I had a mama. I measure other women by the stature of my mama.

I grew up the son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, so I was really close to the church and sang church music between sips at my bottle, you know? I sat on the piano bench next to my mother. She was the church organist, so that music is deeply inside of me.

Understood what the struggle was about. My mother. Couldn't read or write, but she had more sense than many a graduate from Harvard.

What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.

If it weren't for the mentorship and guidance from people like my mother, James Brown and others, I wouldn't have been able to make something of my life.

To be perfectly honest with you, having a mother as an actress - who I watched struggle tremendously during my childhood - and to watch fluctuations of ups and downs is difficult. She did mainly television, so I think I associated that with a life of inconsistency. As I've come into my own, I realize it has nothing to do with the medium.

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn't really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you're trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

The last time I heard real screaming in the theatre was when I went to see a movie I did years ago, called 'Wait Until Dark.' Now, my mother was the least emotional person on the planet, but when I got killed in the movie, she stood up and screamed, 'That's my son!' At Radio City Music Hall in New York!

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

I can't find anything in the Constitution that says you prefer the life of the mother, or the convenience of the mother if it's an abortion by choice, over the potential life of the fetus. Look, I think women, if they're required to not have abortions, could die and could - so I favor a woman's right to choose.

When I was growing up, my mother would always say, 'It will go on your permanent record.' There was no 'permanent record.' If there were a 'permanent record,' I'd never be able to be a lawyer. I was such a bum in elementary school and high school... There is a permanent record today, and it's called the Internet.

I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.

My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.

My mother read nursery rhymes to me, and my grandmother told me folk stories, but as a child I had no interest in writing whatsoever.

My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

Everything my mother made had to cook for 80 hours, and when she made matzoh balls she didn't know fluffy. Everything sank.

I just never saw my mother in any other room but the kitchen. There were always pots going.

My mother's sister was killed in a trolley car accident, so I was raised as one of eight with my sister and six male cousins.

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good. I didn't know we were poor until I started giving interviews.

My mother was a housewife. My father was a garment worker.

My father was placid and easygoing. He owned a small shoe store where I helped out on Saturdays. I think he'd have been pleased if I'd made a career of working in the shoe store. But my mother was ambitious. She encouraged us to read books, and she pushed us toward a musical education.

I wish I had been a better mother and a more compassionate and understanding wife in both of my marriages.

Somewhere deep inside me was the will and determination not only to live, but to be a more present mother for my kids, instead of one who was emotionally unavailable because she was in so much pain, as my own mother was.

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.

Our logo for Lanvin is a mother and a daughter. I've always said, 'It's not a lion, and it's not a horse. It's a mother and a daughter.' I find the logo very emotional.

My father was very sick around the time I was born. The doctors thought he wouldn't live. He did recover, but I don't remember him as very active. I do remember lots of schtick around the dinner table. Generally, he and my brothers and I were all laughing at the same thing my mother did not find funny, whatever that was.

This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case.

Investigations during the last few decades have brought hydrogen instead of carbon, and instead of CO2 water, the mother of all life, into the foreground.

Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.

I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.

I never took banned substances, but I have been courted by doctors who wanted to improve my blood in the laboratory. My mother always put them on a flight.

I came out of the womb drawing on everything, I used to draw on my mother's white furniture and her white walls with her red lipstick and my pencils. Little did she know that would later materialize into me doing what I do now - I'm a painter as well and a micromechanical engineer.

My mother used to take my brother and me to get any books we wanted, but they were second hand books published in the '30s and '40s. I liked scary books.

My second wife, the mother of one of my sons, died of murder. I was not with her, but I could have saved her. I think.

For me, it always goes back to what my mother taught me and my sisters. That all women are beautiful, and we should embrace each other.

If my mother hadn't encouraged me, I would be nervous and feeling like I'm doing something wrong.

My mother always has embedded in us that you guys rock in different ways, and to be able to celebrate that with each other is just beautiful.

When I was growing up, my mother taught me and my sisters to celebrate each other - there was no room in our household for negativity. She taught us to embrace each other, and this was empowering for us. She also taught us the value of celebrating our differences.

You could fancy what you'd like, but as a woman, my mother always raised us to believe in ourselves. I am very grateful that my mother brought me up that way.

I was the child who would leave school and take her clothes off the second I got into the house. I made my mom buy me lingerie when I was 5 years old. I was a sicko. My mother must have been mortified.

I think of my films as not necessarily political but more moral. Between my father, my stepfather, and my mother - they all felt pretty passionately about the importance of standing up and doing the right thing, and none of them were suck-ups. What motivates me is usually abuse of power.

Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.

If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you.

I was raised by a very strict, good mother, so I won't be getting out of line anytime soon.

My mother's family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed.

I do chat to my mother in Norwegian, particularly when we want a secret conversation. It is useful that way.

I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.

One of the things about being raised British in Africa is that you get this double whammy of toughness. The continent in place itself made you quite tough. And then you've got this British mother whose entire being rejects 'coddling' in case it makes you too soft. So there's absolutely nothing standing between you and a fairly rough experience.

I didn't grow up in public life. I lived with my mother in Boston, not in Washington, DC, so I was somewhat sheltered from that.

I think my dad would make an incredible president, and it would be great if he'd run again. But personally, for our family, part of me is glad that he didn't. We lost our mother recently, and we need to focus on ourselves.

A woman's body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother's, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went into and out of it, and as I grew up, I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself.

Being a mother and grandmother is the best of the best in my life. My grandchildren multiply the joy my daughters bring me.

When I was little, I got to pick my hair ribbon from my mother's collection that hung over her dressing-table mirror. I have an entire room of ribbons in my New York apartment.

My grandfather was from outside of Moscow, and my grandmother, although some of her family were French, was from Odessa. They met as immigrants in New York in the early '20s. My mother's family came over from Ireland generations ago.

I poke fun of everybody and everything. And who's easier to make fun of than your mother?

I'm a better cook and more of a perfectionist than my mother.

I'm very close to my mother, but not a single other person in my family.

That attitude that I wouldn't succeed didn't come from my family, it came from school and then the township we lived in. I wasn't going to settle for that, and my mother warned us not to settle for less, to make the most of our lives.

The expectation was I would get married and become a mother and settle down. We didn't have any role models. We saw teachers and doctors and nurses, but I'm not a teacher, and there was no possibility of being a doctor or a nurse. I had to work and find my own way.

I don't run democracy. I train troops to defend democracy and I happen to be their surrogate father and mother as well as their commanding general.

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

When I was growing up, my mother always wore Chanel.

According to my mother, there pretty much wasn't anything I wouldn't eat as a child. Not just try, but eat. I was even inclined to dig into stuff about which she expressed open disgust - lobster and other shellfish, and cheap Chinese food with pepper so hot it made your gums feel like a medieval dentist had been at them.

I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.

My mother has told so many times the unbelievable story of how, as a toddler, I would demand raw onions and eat them like apples, I think that, at this juncture, it is a story that just has to be believed.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You've got to go your own way, and that's what I did.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn't breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children's mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was 'call attention to yourself,' or 'think you were smart.' My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson's disease.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother's illness. She had Parkinson's disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time... All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn't want to get trapped.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I've got older, I can imagine it, I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

I know my father believed and my mother believed in and supported the suffrage movement, and I remember my mother taking me to suffrage meetings held in the home of a Quaker family that lived not far from us.

I always knew I wanted to create. I used to sit in my room for hours drawing and making things. I once got into trouble for cutting up my mother's lampshades to make a dress. I was three.

My mother has always encouraged my creative side. She is a very eclectic, creative woman and looks incredibly glamorous, even when trudging about in wellies. Our family home is full of items from her travels and her amazing etchings and drawings.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father's head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.

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.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

My mother made a lot of things because she thought they'd be healthy for us. There were some very unfortunate experiences with whole wheat bread and bananas. I always tried to get rid of that sandwich and eat one of my friends' lunches.

I grew up around the theatre. My mother is an actress. I would fall asleep on tons of theatre chairs. It's in my blood, it's in my spirit and my fabric of who I am.

I have my mother who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.

I love my heritage! I have my mother, who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.

I've always been very private, maybe because I discovered my mother, who is a wonderful lady, is very emotional.

I've always valued the input of the people I love. So in the past, whenever I'd make a decision - what to wear to an event, whether to pursue a job opportunity - I'd consult those closest to me, like my mother, husband, or manager.

My mother is an actress, and she used to drag me from theater to theater and reading to reading.

My parents weren't married. It wasn't like my dad up and left. I maintained a steady relationship with my grandparents. My dad's mother is my nana, and I'm closer to her than almost anybody in this world.

When I had nothing else, I had my mother and the piano. And you know what? They were all I needed.

When I was younger, my mother and I, we'd have these crazy, crazy fights. Everyone would storm out mad, and the only way that I'd be able to express myself was to write her. We would write letters back and forth for days. When I'm writing, I feel uninterrupted. I write what I'm going through and how I see it.

I've been wanting to have a baby since I was 2 years old - I'm destined to be a mother.

My Mother is an actress, so it's always been a part of my life.

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.

Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

For Astrid, no matter what challenges they go through, they are going to face each other. It's hard for a daughter to accept that her mother is that selfish and that terrible.

When my parents met, my mother was a waitress and my father was a dockyard worker. They were part of that post-war better-yourself generation, so they both went to night school.

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.

I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.

I, personally, have had to rise above my feelings of inferiority to my sister Anjelica, not to mention feeling sorry for myself because I lost my mother so young.

Losing one's mother to a car crash at age four isn't a readily accessible idea of good luck, but I've come to accept it as the condition that was required for my luck to fall into place.

My child was one of Nature's Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture's Lefties: it was no contest.

My mother has stories of leaving me in the bath as small kid, like a 3-year-old, and there being mirrors on the side, and her going to get a towel and coming back in, and me making faces at myself, like, 'Now I'm happy. Now I'm sad.'

I never thought to myself, I'm going to grow up and fall in love with a man or I'm going to fall in love with a woman because my mother is a lesbian.

My mother wanted to abort me, and that was basically a family secret. My grandfather stopped her and said that he had a dream and saw me perfectly. He was a prophetic dreamer, like Martin.

I like being a mother.

My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.

There's no denying that Christy Turlington looks good in everything, but it's especially great when she uses her supermodel looks and charitable spirit to support the organization she founded, Every Mother Counts.

Christmas was the one time of year when my brothers surfaced at home, when my parents and grandparents congregated to eat my mother's roast turkey.

Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments ... Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.

The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.

The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

I think my mother realized she had a somewhat unusual daughter pretty early on.

Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.

When my mother was born on 14 April, he named her after a Latin American holiday, the Day of Americas, that nobody knew about. My due date also happened to be 14 April.

The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

It's a huge change from when I started in the 1960s, but what is really impressive is that the number of ladies on set, the women working on set is a huge percentage. There used to be no women. It was just the leading lady's mother, perhaps the hairdresser and the makeup person.

My mother came from a very affluent background, very Westernized, while my father was more Eastern. So I've had a very good blend of the East and the West. I guess this has been extremely helpful in making my career and the way I function.

I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.

Maybe with boxing and good focus, I can fix myself and make my mother proud.

Where there is a mother in the home, matters go well.

Across the board, from my mother to my father to my aunts and uncles, everybody has always given me a lot of love.

As children, we think our mother has always been a mother, but it is just one of the roles you may have the opportunity to play. They don't define you as a human being.

My mother's favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman.

Oddly enough, I'm not a particularly judgmental person. I just don't have a lot of filtering when I'm in 'tiger mother' mode. I say what comes into my head.

When I was little, my parents really only wanted me to be a scientist or a doctor, they had never even heard of law school. I think even these days if you were to tell your mother you want to be a fashion designer, or an artist or a writer, a lot of Asian parents would be alarmed because they don't think that's a secure career.

I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.

I am a mother, so I'm used to balancing things.

I think of myself as a fairly attractive girl and always have, thanks to my mom. I was brought into this world thinking I was gorgeous because my mother was extremely devoted to this notion.

Well, I took ballet for many, many years, so my whole childhood really revolved around dance class. I grew up around dance, my mother was a dancer.

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.

My mother always thought if her mother hadn't left her, she would have been happy. All the problems she had never would have happened.

My mother believed in curses, karma, good luck, bad luck, feng shui. Her amorphous set of beliefs showed me you can pick and choose the qualities of your philosophy, based on what works for you.

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.

My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour, I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.

My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.

My mother's openness has remained inspiring to me. I strive to be a skeptic, in the best sense of that word: I question everything, and yet I'm open to everything. And I don't have immovable beliefs. My values shift and grow with my experiences - and as my context changes, so does what I believe.

There are things coming from me that I felt I wanted to talk about. My search for my own blend of spirituality, my acknowledgement of my sexuality, my being the single mother of a young man.