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.
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
I did make a choice when I got away from baseball to be there to get my kids off to college.
My life had been very work-orientated, and all in close-up. Once I had the family, it went into sudden widescreen.
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
Once a month we have 'dessert for dinner' night. I'll make four separate desserts. They'll come home from school and eat as much cake and custard and ice cream as they can physically get in their guts. Because sometimes I think, let them just be children.
When I'm home, I spend Sunday with my husband. If we're not cooking, we travel around in our camper, stop at fast-food restaurants, and picnic. We love that stuff that will harden your arteries in a hurry.
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