Top 40 Hope Edelman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, prepared to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways.”

— Hope Edelman

2. “When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends.”

— Hope Edelman

3. “There is an emptiness inside of me – a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional and strong as a mother’s love. And I will never be loved that way again.”

— Hope Edelman

4. “Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as they are by those who stay. Loss is our legacy. Insight is our gift. Memory is our guide.”

— Hope Edelman

5. “When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it’s the loss of all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past. You also lose the final buffer between you and death. Even if you’re an adult, it’s weird to be orphaned.”

— Hope Edelman

6. “I see the enormous value of a mother’s presence because I live everyday with its absence.”

— Hope Edelman

7. “Someone did us all a grave injustice by implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.”

— Hope Edelman

8. “If I had to pinpoint my mother’s location, I’d say she’s nowhere and everywhere at the same time. She’s a foggy memory I can’t quite bring into focus and a gentle spirit that infuses all my days. She hovers in the background of my life now, suspended, shapeless, like familiar air.”

— Hope Edelman

9. “When a mother dies too young, something inside her daughter always feels incomplete. There’s a missing piece she continues to look for, an emptiness she keeps trying to fill. The.”

— Hope Edelman

10. “Grief needs an outlet. Creativity offers one. Some psychiatrists see mourning and creativity as the perfect marriage, the thought processes of one neatly complementing the other. A child’s contradictory impulses to both acknowledge and deny a parent’s death represents precisely the type of rich ambiguity that inspires artistic expression.”

— Hope Edelman

11. “When a mother dies, a daughter grieves. And then her life moves on. She does, thankfully, feel happiness again. But the missing her, the wanting her, the wishing she were still here – I will not lie to you, although you probably already know. That part never ends.”

— Hope Edelman

12. “I do know that mother loss can be heartbreaking at any age. No matter how old we are, we yearn for a mother’s love throughout our lives, reaching for the security and comfort we believe only she can provide at times of illness, transition, or stress.”

— Hope Edelman

13. “When my mother died, a lot of people tried to comfort me by saying, ‘Well, you still have your father. You still have a brother and sister. You have a wonderful husband and beautiful children.’ And you know what? That’s all true. That’s all completely true. But I still don’t have my mother.”

— Hope Edelman

14. “When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother.”

— Hope Edelman

15. “Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane.”

— Hope Edelman

16. “A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.”

— Hope Edelman

17. “Motherless mothers with a history of caretaking experience, usually for sick mothers or younger siblings when they were still children themselves, said that the round-the-clock nature of infant and toddler care sometimes brought up familiar emotions from the past.”

— Hope Edelman

18. “Virginia Woolf, who was thirteen when her mother died, wrote, “Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.”

— Hope Edelman

19. “You’re driving in the car and you feel like your whole world has fallen apart. And people in the car beside you are laughing and carrying on. Their life is normal, and you think, ‘Goddamn it. What gives you the right to laugh?’ Because nothing has happened to them. You don’t understand how everything else can go on normally when your life will never be normal again. Ever.”

— Hope Edelman

20. “I miss her when I can’t remember what works best on insect bites, and when nobody else cares how rude the receptionist at the doctor’s office was to me. Whether she actually would have flown in to act as baby nurse or mailed me cotton balls and calamine lotion if she were alive isn’t really the issue. It’s the fact that I can’t ask her for these things that makes me miss her all over again.”

— Hope Edelman

21. “New York City is filled with random, quirky moments like this, chance collisions that just might change your life.”

— Hope Edelman

22. “When a daughter loses a mother, she learns early that human relationships are temporary, that terminations are beyond her control, and her feelings of basic trust and security are shattered. The result? A sense of inner fragility and overriding vulnerability. She discovers she’s not immune to unfortunate events, and the fear of subsequent similar losses may become a defining characteristic of her personality.”

— Hope Edelman

23. “Strange, now, how after so many years my mother’s model is starting to recede. Before I became a mother, I was a motherless daughter, and “motherless” always overshadowed “daughter” in that phrase. Now I’m a motherless mother, and “mother” is the word that carries most of the weight. Early loss influences me, daily, but it doesn’t define me anymore.”

— Hope Edelman

24. “Somewhere in that hour I lost all relation to a middle ground, and I didn’t regain it for what became a very long time. In.”

— Hope Edelman

25. “My father told relatives at the funeral and in the house afterward that I was “the rock” of the family. “We’d all fall apart if it weren’t for Hope,” he said, and they nodded in agreement. Their praise, of course, only made me want to maintain my perfectly chiseled marble facade.”

— Hope Edelman

26. “Our mothers are our most direct connection to our history and gender.”

— Hope Edelman

27. “Every cause is painful, and every loss leaves us wondering how we could have acted otherwise to prevent the death. But because different causes of death provoke sufficiently different responses – anger toward suicide victims; blame for homicide, terrorism, and war; helplessness and fear with natural disasters; and hopelessness with terminal disease – the specific way a mother dies or leaves influences how her daughter will respond. Long-term.”

— Hope Edelman

28. “Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Thousand Acres, reveals what can happen.”

— Hope Edelman

29. “The mother who abandons her daughter leaves a pile of questions behind: Who was she? Where is she? Why did she leave? Like the child whose mother dies, the abandoned daughter lives with a loss, but she also struggles with the knowledge that her mother is alive yet inaccessible and out of touch. Death has a finality that abandonment simply does not.”

— Hope Edelman

30. “Witnessing a mother’s slow physical decline can be the equivalent of of experiencing long-term trauma. The daughter’s feelings of helplessness, anger, and fear persist. And persist. And persist. She may alternate between wanting to protect her mother and resenting her, an advance-and-retreat dance of identification and rejection than can span years.”

— Hope Edelman

31. “My mother, as a woman in her sixties, is mostly a mystery to me. In my mind, she’s an eternal forty-two, and as her daughter, I never get past seventeen. There.”

— Hope Edelman

32. “Even though we knew she was going to die eventually, when it happened it was still a terrible, rude shock. I thought I was prepared, but when it happened I fell apart. That’s when I realized I’d been hanging on to the hope, however slim, that as long as she was alive she might somehow get better.”

— Hope Edelman

33. “But the fact is that she went away and left us all to cope with the wreckage she left behind.”

— Hope Edelman

34. “The degree to which a surviving parent copes is the most important indicator of the child’s long-term adaptation. Kids whose surviving parents are unable to function effectively in the parenting role show more anxiety and depression, as well as sleep and health problems, than those whose parents have a strong support network and solid inner resources to rely on.”

— Hope Edelman

35. “I couldn’t chance failing in New York yet, letting the city fail me. It was the only place I knew I belonged. If I couldn’t survive there, I would have no place else to go.”

— Hope Edelman

36. “Sometimes I wonder what losing my mother would have been like if I’d spent just a few more years with her, or if I’d known her for a few less.”

— Hope Edelman

37. “Experiencing that intense emotion is what helps us, ultimately, accept that our mothers are gone.”

— Hope Edelman

38. “Twenty-five percent said they were experiencing more sibling conflict than before. This was usually in families when siblings were perceived to be unhelpful as a parent was dying, or where sibling relationships had been strained from the start.”

— Hope Edelman

39. “A daughter whose mother chose to leave her or was incapable of mothering may feel like a member of the emotional underclass, like a dispensable part of society whose needs the government has ignored. As a result, she often develops a sense of devaluation and unworthiness even more profound than that of the daughter whose mother has died.”

— Hope Edelman

40. “I think feeling it, letting myself risk love and letting myself be loved, is one of the biggest challenges left for me.”

— Hope Edelman

41. “This is a reactionary rage, often fueled by a sense of deprivation and a belief the world owes something to the daughter who lost her mother too young. But underneath it is usually a deep anger toward the mother herself.”

— Hope Edelman

42. “We’ve been lucky,” he said, rising from his chair with his palm pressed against his forehead as he heard the ambulance attendants on the front path outside. “We had her four months longer than she was expected to live.” Lucky? I thought, as I stood behind an emergency room curtain an hour later, holding my mother’s hand and trying to press ice chips between her cracked and bloodstained lips. Could someone identify the lucky people here?”

— Hope Edelman

43. “Women need to recognize that in times of great stress, such extreme thoughts are normal,” she says. “It’s a very human impulse to want to live your life in a happy, healthy, productive way, and it’s a terribly stressful experience to watch someone you love in pain and know she’s not enjoying life herself. When we wish a loved one would die not only so that she’s out of her pain but also because we want our lives to continue as normally as possible, it’s neither good nor bad. It’s simply human.”

— Hope Edelman