Mother Quotes

Work creates an enormous sense of self and I saw that in my mother. She was an enormous, towering figure to me in the best possible way. I picked up a lot of things from her in the way that I work… I also picked up a lot of the failings of when your father doesn’t have those things and that results in a house that turns into a minefield.

I met my darling wife Wilnelia in 1980 when we were on the judging panel for the Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall. With two ex-wives and five daughters, I thought I wouldn’t be involved with anyone for a long time – if ever. Winnie was so gorgeous, my jaw dropped – and it’s a big jaw to drop.

You can sail in the desert with a ship of fools. You can smuggle in Moses and his book of rules. But you can’t take a mother and give her back her son. What kind of freedom is bought with a gun? People like to build their prison walls when they’re afraid to look inside… a thousand points of light are the muzzle flashes in the night. And the freedoms you profess to hold won’t bring the dead back from the cold.

Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the “things” of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. “We give our children guns and computer games,” Wendy said. “They gave their children the land.”

My relationship with God developed at an early age. I was raised on a remote little ranch, where I had for company and for the fullness of my life three other humans and an enormous amount of animals and land and sky and wind. As a child, my experience of God included everything-a love of the whole beauty around me. And the country was so beautiful: mountains that ended in aspen groves and streams, thick with wild animals and game of all kinds. One time I said to my mother, “You know, I think heaven is just like this, only the animals would speak to us; they wouldn’t be afraid of us.”