78 Uplifting Motherhood Quotes

Motherhood is a journey filled with joy, challenges, laughter, and love. It’s a role that demands strength, patience, and an infinite amount of compassion. Whether you're a new mom navigating the early days of parenthood or a seasoned mother reflecting on years gone by, a few words of inspiration can make all the difference. In this post, we've gathered a curated collection of 78 uplifting motherhood quotes that celebrate the essence of being a mother. These quotes are intended to uplift your spirits, keep you motivated, and remind you of the beautiful, albeit sometimes difficult, path you’re walking. So, take a moment to read through and find solace, joy, or perhaps even a laugh, resonating in the shared experiences of moms everywhere.

1. “Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.” - Barbara Kingsolver

2. “A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.” - Barbara Kingsolver

3. “She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.” - Nicole Krauss

4. “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. ” - Abigail Adams

5. “I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ” - Nella Larsen

6. “I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. I don’t think it’s such a big thing anymore, but the idea that you sacrifice everything for your children—it’s a load of rubbish. It leads to very destructive living and thinking, and it has a much worse effect on children than if you go out and live your own life. You’re meant to adore your children at all times, and you’re not meant to have a bad thought about them. That’s facism, you know, and it’s elevating the child at the expense of the mother. It’s like your life is not valid except in fulfilling this child’s needs. What about all your needs, your desires, your wants, your problems? They’re going to come out anyway, so it’s better they’re acknowledged straight off. Having said that, I really do believe that children have to be protected. They have to be loved. Somewhere between the two, I think, something needs to be sorted out. The relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex. There’s every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would alleviate them in some way” - Marina Carr

7. “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” - Margaret Sanger

8. “So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.” - Anne Lamott

9. “Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.” - Kim Edwards

10. “The terrible things that happen to us in life never make any sense when we're in the middle of them, floundering, no end in sight. There is no rope to hang on to, it seems. Mothers can soothe children during those times, through their reassurance. No one worries about you like your mother, and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe, things that happen unwieldy. You cannot turn to her anymore, and it changes your life forever. There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you'd had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting; and who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childgood goes with her. Memories are very different and cannot soothe you the same way her touch did.” - Adriana Trigiani

11. “Later, when I was a new mother, I recognized her somewhat awestruck fascination with me. When you are fully immersed in the daily care and quirks and habits of a small, dependent child, an older kid who is articulate, civilized, and capable of moving around in the world without getting itself killed can seem as supernatural as a wizard.” - Kate Moses

12. “Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done.” - Rebecca Woolf

13. “Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in the world...How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling and domestic artistry?...I wanted to go out and do things--write books, speak out. I've been driven by that. I don't know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to BE at home--and really, to be in herself. It's actually very beautiful what she does...I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home.” - Sue Monk Kidd

14. “...always-the sharp,plaintive edgeon the rimof the spoonof my giving.(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions')” - Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

15. “Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.” - Jodi Picoult

16. “I think all mothers are alike, regardless of cultural background, when it comes to illogical cleaning.” - Neal Shusterman

17. “Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of of deepest sin in the most sacred of quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

18. “Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.” - Jodi Picoult

19. “(24/7) once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer.” - Jodi Picoult

20. “Here's what I hadn't realized: the mother you haven't seen for almost thirty-six years isn't your mother, she's a stranger. Sharing DNA doesn't make you fast friends. This wasn't a joyous reunion. It was just awkward.” - Jodi Picoult

21. “I could not get my fill of looking.There should be a song for women to sing at this moment or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name that moment.” - Anita Diamant

22. “There is no greater good in all the world than motherhood. The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation.” - James E. Faust

23. “Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.” - Salman Rushdie

24. “What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.” - Sylvia Plath

25. “A mother knows what her child's gone through, even if she didn't see it herself.” - Pramoedya Ananta Toer

26. “But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.” - Barbara Kingsolver

27. “Leah: I want those gubs Mommy.Kate: They're not 'gubs' they're 'gloves'Aaden and Leah try and say glovesLeah: Gloves!Kate: Good job!Aaden: Gubs!Kate: No” - Kate Gosselin

28. “my mother, poor fish,wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times aweek, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!why don't you ever smile?"and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was thesaddest smile I ever saw” - Charles Bukowski

29. “I think motherhood is the noblest task of all, because you cannot do it at your convenience, or tailor it to suit your preferences. You have to be ready to give up everything when you take on this task: your time, restful nights, your hobbies, your pursuit of physical fitness, any beauty you may have had, and all of the private little pleasures you might have counted as a right, from late dinners and long soaks in the tub to weekend excursions and cycling trips…I’m not saying you can’t have any of these things, but you have to be ready to let them all go if you’re going to have children and put them first.” - Johann Christoph Arnold

30. “Progress is hardly ever dramatic; in fact, it is usually very slow. As every parent and teacher knows, education is never a matter of ten-step plans or quick formulas, but of faithful commitment to the mundane challenges of daily life: getting up from the sofa to spend time with our children, loving them and disciplining them, becoming involved in their lives at school and, most important, making sure they have a wholesome family life to return to at home. Maybe that is why Jesus teaches us to ask for strength little by little, on a daily basis - "Give us this day our daily bread" - and why he stresses the significance of even the smallest, humblest beginnings: "Wherever two of you agree about anything you ask for, it shall be done for you... For where two or three come together in my name, I shall be with them" (Mt. 18:19-20).” - Johann Christoph Arnold

31. “So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary's College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.” - Sherman Alexie

32. “Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is place in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no others hands the sacred and holy trust given to her.” - J.R. Miller

33. “She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.” - Kate Atkinson

34. “And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, than I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt, which disappears when you cook with it. I am salt. Without my children, I cease to exist.” - Thrity Umrigar

35. “She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.” - George Orwell

36. “(Georgie) I hated going to the playground EVERYDAY. If someone had only told me it wouldn't last forever” - Nancy Woodruff

37. “It's 5:22pm you're in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a voice that could saw through cement, "But mommy, puleeze, puleeze" because you have not bought him the latest "Lunchables," which features, as the four food groups, Cheetos, a Snickers, Cheez Whiz, and Twizzlers. Your teenager, who has not spoken a single word in the past foor days, except, "You've ruined my life," followed by "Everyone else has one," is out in the car, sulking, with the new rap-metal band Piss on the Parentals blasting through the headphones of a Discman. To distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other shoppers who have already deemed you the worst mother in America, you leaf through People magazine. Inside, Uma thurman gushes "Motherhood is Sexy." Moving on to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, "When I hear his cry at six-thirty in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I'm not an early riser." Another unexpected source of earth-mother wisdom, the newly maternal Pamela Lee, also confides to People, "I just love getting up with him in the middle of the night to feed him or soothe him." Brought back to reality by stereophonic whining, you indeed feel as sexy as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.” - Susan J. Douglas

38. “The recent spate of magazines for "parents" (i.e., mothers) bombard the anxiety-induced mothers of America with reassurances that they can (after a $100,000 raise and a personality transplant) produce bright, motivated, focused, fun-loving, sensitive, cooperative, confident, contented kids just like the clean, obedient ones on the cover.” - Susan J. Douglas

39. “Then she rushes to pick up Asha from school, where she is known only as "Asha's mom" by the other mothers, who seem to all spend a lot of time together. Somer has no time for the PTA and bake sales. She has no time for herself. Her profession no longer defines her, but neither does being a mother. Both are pieces of her, and yet they don't seem to add up to a whole.” - shilpi somaya gowda

40. “[On visitors after having a new baby...] "Put a lock on the door, barricade it if you have to. No one gets past that front door unless they come bearing one of two things: food or cleaning products!” - Claudine Wolk

41. “Laborsaving devices do not necessarily save time, but they increase our expectactations of what mothers should accomplish” - Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

42. “A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.” - Peter De Vries

43. “Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand.” - James T. Farrell

44. “These girls probably use double negatives and watch "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" with their babies instead of reading Eric Carle.” - Natalie Taylor

45. “The best love in the world, is the love of a man. The love of a man who came from your womb, the love of your son! I don't have a daughter, but maybe the love of a daughter is the best, too. I am first and foremost me, but right after that, I am a mother. The best thing that I can ever be, is me. But the best gift that I will ever have, is being a mother.” - C. JoyBell C.

46. “When I wasn’t in the barn garden, helping out, sorting seeds or checking hoses I’d spend time alone, usually in the bathroom adjacent to Joel’s room, staring into the shattered mirror as my hand gently caressed my baby bump.More often than not I would cry. Not because my pregnancy upset me, or that my hormones were getting the better of me, but because I missed Joel, my baby’s father. That the baby would grow up without a dad made me anxious. Then again, if he had survived, what irreparable damage would he have suffered and how would his pain translate to his child? Jesus, I was studying myself in the very mirror he’d smashed the night he chose to take his own life.The bump had grown slowly in the last couple of months. With these limited resources, I didn’t have the privilege of eating whatever I craved. Had that been the case, I was sure I would have been bigger by now. Still, I tried to eat as well and as often as I could and the size of my belly had proven that my attempts at proper nutrition were at least growing something in there.Nothing made me happier than feeling my baby move. It was a constant source of relief for me. In our present circumstances, with no vitamins and barely any meat products save the recent stash of jerky Earl had found in an abandoned trailer, my diet consisted of berries, lettuce, and canned beans for the most part. Feeling the baby move inside me was an experience I often enjoyed alone. I would think of Joel then as well. Imagining his hand on my belly, with mine guiding his to the kicks and punches.” - Michael Poeltl

47. “I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.” - Jodi Picoult

48. “A pair of young mothers now became the centre of interest. They had risen from their lying-in much sooner than the doctors would otherwise have allowed. (French doctors are always very good about recognizing the importance of social events, and certainly in this case had the patients been forbidden the ball the might easily have fretted themselves to death.) One came as the Duchesse de Berri with l’Enfant du Miracle, and the other as Madame de Montespan and the Duc du Maine. The two husbands, the ghost of the Duc de Berri, a dagger sticking out of his evening dress, and Louis XIV, were rather embarrassed really by the horrible screams of their so very young heirs, and hurried to the bar together. The noise was indeed terrific, and Albertine said crossly that had she been consulted she would, in this case, have permitted and even encouraged the substitution of dolls. The infants were then dumped down to cry themselves to sleep among the coats on her bed, whence they were presently collected by their mothers’ monthly nannies. Nobody thereafter could feel quite sure that the noble families of Bregendir and Belestat were not hopelessly and for ever interchanged. As their initials and coronets were, unfortunately, the same, and their baby linen came from the same shop, it was impossible to identify the children for certain. The mothers were sent for, but the pleasures of society rediscovered having greatly befogged their maternal instincts, they were obliged to admit they had no idea which was which. With a tremendous amount of guilty giggling they spun a coin for the prettier of the two babies and left it at that.” - Nancy Mitford

49. “In a child's eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.” - N.K. Jemisin

50. “A mother is a mother from the moment her baby is first placed in her arms until eternity. It didn't matter if her child were three, thirteen, or thirty.” - Sarah Strohmeyer

51. “Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don't get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives.” - Bella Pollen

52. “God save me ere I have any babies. They are grabby, clingy creatures who steal your figure and always want a ribbon or a wooden sword. And who sometimes make you die bearing them.” - J. Anderson Coats

53. “You know you're a mom when you open the door to the dishwasher mid-cycle and think, 'This is the closest I'm going to get to a spa treatment till next Mother's Day.'""Joining the words 'Lose Weight, Effortlessly!' in the same sentence may be a form of hate speech.""Try to make time for the things that are important, not just the things that are urgent.""I want my work to matter, my words to count for the good, and to spread some good cheer along the way.” - Judy Gruen

54. “One unforeseen advantage of having a  child was that it gave me the excuse to talk to myself to my heart's content and pretend it was for my daughters benefit.” - Catherine Sanderson

55. “Are you scared of going in to see the raghnaid [the council]?” asked a gray female pup. “Are you cag mag [crazy]? If a bear was his Milk Giver, you think he’s scared of the raghnaid?” - Kathryn Lasky

56. “Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.” - Barbara Kingsolver

57. “For a long time, I tried to make my ilfe work, to make our family work. I got tired, though. Five children wears you out until the only thing left inside you, the only thing you've got to give, is a memory of what you thought you'd be.” - Amy Franklin-Willis

58. “If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary encironments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble” – be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women have to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do so?” - Elizabeth Gilbert

59. “If I had known what it meant to love, I wouldn't have had children, because once we love, we love forever, like Uncle Two's wife, Step-aunt Two, who can't stop loving her gambler son, the son who is burning up the family fortune like a pyromaniac.” - Kim Thuy

60. “A challenging career suddenly seemed more productive to me because I could measure the results of my work. These precious little ones had endless needs. They were busy little sinful creatures who demanded all of my body, time, life, emotions, and attention! As much as I loved my children, I often felt like a failure. Surely someone else could do a better job with these precious ones than I. And what exactly was I supposed to be accomplishing anyway? Was I wasting my time? What had this husband, who professed to love me, done to me?” - Sally Clarkson

61. “I often must sacrifice my own needs and desires for the purpose of giving my children what they need and modeling for them the depths of Christ's love."...make myself available in the routine tasks and myriad interruptions of daily life b/c I believe it is God's will for me to serve my family through them.” - Sally Clarkson

62. “It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.” - Phyllis Diller

63. “She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink.” - Barbara Kingsolver

64. “When you hold a child to your breast to nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it sprang.” - Diana Gabaldon

65. “She caught herself working so hard at mothering that she forgot to enjoy her children. -from ~Homecoming Season~” - Susan Wiggs

66. “What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm.' The smell of fire taht meant 'Flee.' The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things?And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.” - Amy Tan

67. “Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse.” - Rousseau Jean - Jacques

68. “Her eyes were open, taking in my tired face... Her face twitched into what looked like a squinty smile, and in her wordless expression I saw gratitude, and relief, and trust. I wanted, desperately, not to disappoint her.” - Vanessa Diffenbaugh

69. “Out of the woman's great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, ans she let it flow. There was more than enough for the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him.” - Pearl S. Buck

70. “لو أخبرته بأنني أحبه، فهو ينظر إليّ بخواء وحسب.. كل ما أفعله ناقص ومزيف، وأنا دائماً بحاجة إلى حججٍ وأدلةٍ للبرهنة على أمومتي.” - بثينة العيسى

71. “This is one of the weird things about motherhood. You can predict that some of your best moments will happen around the toilet at six am while you're holding a pile of fingernail clipping like a Santeria priestess.” - Tina Fey

72. “Every woman is a gift when she becomes a daughter, Every woman is beautiful when she becomes a lover, Every woman is special when she becomes a wife, Every woman is a god when she becomes a Mother” - Vivek Thangaswamy

73. “I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.” - Shirley Jackson

74. “I find it appalling that the Church claims Mary consented at the age of thirteen to become the mother of God.”“But she did,” James said. “There is ample evidence to show she consented.”“Isn’t that the classic defense of the pedophile?” Helena asked. “In Christ’s time and even today in some countries in the Middle East and India, child marriages are customary. But that doesn’t make it right. In Europe and the U.S. we prosecute adults for preying on children. God would be arrested for impregnating a girl below the age of consent.”“People didn’t live as long then,” James said.Helena would not back down. “But human biology hasn’t changed. My point is she was too young to consent. The brain of a young teenager isn’t fully developed.”“The mysteries of the faith require us to have faith.” “Don’t hide behind that nonsense. What kind of message is the Church sending to women? Only virgin children are pure? Experienced mothers are impure and unfit to raise Christ? It’s creepy and insulting when you think about it, but you would have me suspend rational judgment and just accept something I would tear your eyes out for thinking about my underage sister?” - Janet M. Tavakoli

75. “I wrote about the rush of love, the changing of a woman into a mother—a process that happened without conscious thought, as if the heart knew what the mind and body took time to learn. Love is the one thing that matters. That makes everything else matter. That makes everything worthwhile.” - Lisa Wingate

76. “A shaft of sunlight pierced the dark cluds and she looked up to see a silver lining. It was a sign, she thought.” - Diane Grifith

77. “It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.” - L.R. Knost

78. “Fanfare for the MakersA cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?To the small fire that never leaves the sky.To the great fire that boils the daily pot.To all the things we are not remembered by,Which we remember and bless. To all the thingsThat will not notice when we die,Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.So fanfare for the Makers: who composeA book of words or deeds who runs may writeAs many who do run, as a family growsAt times like sunflowers turning towards the light.As sometimes in the blackout and the raidsOne joke composed an island in the night.As sometimes one man’s kindness pervadesA room or house or village, as sometimesMerely to tighten screws or sharpen bladesCan catch a meaning, as to hear the chimesAt midnight means to share them, as one manIn old age plants an avenue of limesAnd before they bloom can smell them, before they spanThe road can walk beneath the perfected arch,The merest greenprint when the lives beganOf those who walk there with him, as in defaultOf coffee men grind acorns, as in despiteOf all assaults conscripts counter assault,As mothers sit up late night after nightMoulding a life, as miners day by dayDescend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kiteIn an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers playTheir fish, as workers work and can take prideIn spending sweat before they draw their pay.As horsemen fashion horses while they ride,As climbers climb a peak because it is there,As life can be confirmed even in suicide:To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair.Louis Macneice” - Louis MacNeice