Pamela Druckerman Quotes
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The main thing my bookcase says about me is that I'm not French.
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I've got letters from all over the world saying what you're describing as American parenting is Chilean middle-class parenting, or it is Finnish middle-class parenting, or it is Slovak middle-class parenting.
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When I was 41, I had a very bad back pain, and it turned out to be Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
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I spent most of my adolescence feeling awkward but never once mentioned it.
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It's fine to discuss money in France, as long as you're complaining that you don't have enough, or boasting about getting a bargain.
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There's an American idea that you want to look as young as you can for as long as you can. If you can be mistaken for a teenager from behind into your 50s, then you've won; you've succeeded.
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Although I wrote a book about infidelity around the world, I ended up concluding that fidelity is quite a good idea.
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Being an immigrant mother can be hard, but being a poor immigrant mother is much harder. You don't generally get to sit in cafes polishing your French by reading 'Le Monde.'
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If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a French cafe. It's like a public referendum on your face.
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America's parenting customs can shock foreigners.
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The question on my husband's birthday is always, What do you get for the man who has nothing?
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The French aren't known for being hilarious. When I told Parisians I was interested in French humor, they'd say 'French what?'
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There's this idea in America that you can be whatever you want. That remains an ideal in terms of how you dress too - when you go shopping, you try on all possible selves and then decide.
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I think kids in France, and certainly in my household, don't necessarily stop interrupting when you tell them, but they gradually become more aware of other people, and that means that you can have the expectation of finishing a conversation.
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Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.
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Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.
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I gradually understood why European mothers aren't in perpetual panic about their work-life balance and don't write books about how executive moms should just try harder: Their governments are helping them - and doing it competently.
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I'm speaking in very broad brushstrokes, but in France, there's generally this idea that you should look like the best version of the age that you are.
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How hard or easy it is to raise kids, especially while working, is a big part of people's well-being everywhere.
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If you had asked me what I wanted when I was 12 years old, I probably would have said, 'To marry a plastic surgeon.' You can hardly blame me: I was growing up in Miami.
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The whole point of a commencement speech is to say something encouraging.
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I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they'll regret things that they haven't done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to.
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French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.
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I always knew the French had a penchant for criticism and abstract thought. Usually, that just meant they complained a lot.