The first big stars, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, you know, these were gigantic stars. I even wonder sometimes whether all music actually comes from women, whether the first glimmering of music is a mother soothing a baby.
Well-behaved: he always speaks as if his mother might be listening.
It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother.
You make sacrifices to become a mother, but you really find yourself and your soul.
When I turned 50, I truly felt I was too old to work in Silicon Valley. No one said anything to my face, but when you can be the mother of some of the people you're interviewing with, that says it all.
Lucy Mercedes Martinez, my mother, was probably my first mentor. She really tried to take care of me in spite of myself, and in spite of her own struggles with alcohol. She was an immigrant who had never finished school. But she was also a Renaissance woman who read voraciously. She spoke several languages.
And for anyone who ever thought that Ellen and I broke it off because of sexuality, you couldn't be more mistaken. And for anyone who thought my mother's prayers had anything to do with me marrying a man, forget it.
For every Mother Teresa, there's a Jeffrey Dahmer.
On 'Black-ish,' I like my makeup to be really natural - so much that I can do it myself. My character is a mother of four and a doctor and a wife, who would not have time to be putting on eyeshadow or curling her lashes.
I grew up in a house full of women: my mother, grandmother, three sisters, and two female cats. And I still have the buzz of their conversations in my head. As an adult, I have more female friends than male ones: I just love the way that women talk.
I don't have to have a child come from my womb to have a connection. Children that are already born are beautiful to me. I can definitely be a mother to them.
Mother was a great force in her area of evangelism.
I think we were born 6 feet tall and then started to grow from there. My dad's not particularly tall - only 5 feet, 11 inches - but his mother was almost 6 feet and straight as a ramrod: a German woman who used to scare the hell out of me.
In December 1989, my mother died very suddenly, and that sparked a re-evaluation of what I was doing, and I realized I was mediocre at everything. I was a mediocre IBM employee, I was a mediocre entrepreneur, I was a mediocre artist. I decided that, although my mom wouldn't be around to see it, I wanted to be great at something.
My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.
So I told Robert from the start that if we couldn't get Charles and Max to take part, but especially Charles, that I didn't want to make the film. So would he call his mother and talk to Charles and see if Charles would at all be interested.
My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.
My parents separated when I was 2, and my dad always lived in Chicago and my mother in L.A. I'd go back and forth and sometimes spend the summer with my dad, but L.A. was home.
Overall, I think any opportunity to expose people to art on a mass level - to have some kid in Oklahoma say to his mother, 'I want to be an artist' - is a good thing.
My mother really didn't know a heck of a lot about business. She was a very good mother, that made sure we ate right and we had our cod liver oil, but didn't know a heck of a lot about what I did.
My parents would always have us, as many times as we could, sit together for dinner and talk about what was happening in our lives, and so we created a great recipe where I could be completely honest with my mother and to an extent my father, being an attorney.
As a little girl in Arizona, none of the women in my family had a cultural connection with Girl Scouts, but the opportunity resonated with my mother as a platform that would allow me to excel in school.
That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.
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 dream was to play football for the Oakland Raiders. But my mother thought I would get hurt playing football, so she chose baseball for me. I guess moms do know best.
Obviously, I'm suffering from lack of sleep, but it truly is a blessing to be a mother.
It is a sign of my mother's determination, confidence, and creativity that more than 50 years after launching the renowned Ebony Fashion Fair show, her timeless sense of style endures as a guidepost for today's fashion-loving women.
My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.
My daughter teases me once in a while saying, Remember when you used to be my mother and you had black hair?
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
People talk about retiring. I never said that r-word. People though I went away after the Olympic Games. I took time off to do something I've always wanted to be - a mother.
My mother was an artist and highly strung, whereas my father was much calmer.
But I still always felt the absence of a mother.
After I got this job at the syndicate, I started sending them money so they could go on trips and do the things they could never afford to do. All the while, I never knew that my mother was socking money away.
My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines.
It's tough to be a mother. At any age. It's tough. It's a lot of work.
