mother

I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.

That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

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

If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

You may lose your wife, you may lose your dog, your mother may hate you. None of those things matter. What matters is that you achieve success and become free. Then you can do whatever you like.

My entire life changed when I became a mother - my priorities, my understanding, appreciation of life, and my relationship with God.

I wish I had a great relationship with my mother.

A lot of people don't understand the Black Panthers Party's relationship with white mother country radicals.

I wanted a good relationship with my mother, and I realized I had a choice: Either I could spend all my time angry that she didn't give me the hugs I thought I needed, or I could understand that she hugs differently. It's not a spread-open-the-arms, 'come here' hug. She hugs by sheltering me from her worries.

My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.

A people's relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.

I'm looking forward to sproglets but, as I'm the main breadwinner, I feel I ought to capitalise on my career for a bit longer. Mother keeps telling me I should go and freeze some eggs. Not terribly romantic, is it?

I did want a boy child because I had this romantic idea that a boy child when he's 16 takes his mother out for dinner.

Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it.

I'm the middle man. I try to keep people happy. I go out of my way to get a smile. That's the way my mother raised me.