You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
Interpretation
A mother's intuition and awareness are often profound, allowing her to sense her child's presence and feelings from afar.
This quote humorously illustrates the extraordinary bond and sensitivity that often exists between a mother and her child. It highlights how a mother's instinct can be so finely tuned that even the slightest disturbance resonates with her, while a father may not respond to more significant events, showcasing the unique ways in which parents can demonstrate their love and concern for their children.
In practice
In a speech about family dynamics, you could use this quote to emphasize the unique bond between mother and child.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat
Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?
Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.
I want my children to know that we often become resilient for others.
The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.
I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.
It is from God that parents receive their children, and it is to God that they should lead them.
Let me tell you a secret about a father's love,/A secret that my daddy said was just between us.”/He said, “Daddies don't just love their children every now and then./It's a love without end, amen, it's a love without end, amen.
I mean, I grew up in a community where people took care of each other. I grew up in a community where my mother, my parents, my extended family really wanted for children to be nurtured and challenged and not harmed.
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