Pamela Druckerman Quotes
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The whole point of a commencement speech is to say something encouraging.
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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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The French view is really one of balance, I think... What French women would tell me over and over is, it's very important that no part of your life - not being a mom, not being a worker, not being a wife - overwhelms the other part.
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Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London.
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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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When you're further along in your career, you probably have more money and more means; you have to stop yourself from giving your child too much. Whereas, if you're in twenties, you might just get by.
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The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.
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Here's some news you might find surprising: By and large, the French like Jews.
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I spend much of my free time listening to podcasts of American comedians talking to each other.
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Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.
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Unlike the time sink of binge-watching a TV series, podcasts actually made me more efficient. Practically every dull activity - folding laundry, applying makeup - became tolerable when I did it while listening to a country singer describing his hardscrabble childhood, or a novelist defending her open marriage.
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French children seem to be able to play by themselves in a way.
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We Anglophones have reasons for adopting strange diets. Increasingly, we live alone. We have an unprecedented choice of foods, and we're not sure what's in them or whether they're good for us. And we expect to customize practically everything: parenting, news, medicines, even our own faces.
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In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.
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Just as dressing well in your forties entails making choices that reflect who you are and not just wearing generic basics, looking good as you get older requires accentuating and enjoying what's specific to you rather than striving for cookie-cutter perfection.
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And as a mother of three with a full-time job, podcasts gave me the illusion of having a vibrant social life. I was constantly 'meeting' new people. My favorite hosts started to seem like friends: I could detect small shifts in their moods and tell when they were flirting with guests.
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When people used to ask me what I missed about America, I would say, 'The optimism.' I grew up in the land of hope, then moved to one whose catchphrases are 'It's not possible' and 'Hell is other people.' I walked around Paris feeling conspicuously chipper.
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Optimism - even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty - has long been an American hallmark.
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What you can say, what French parents say to their kids is, 'You don't have to eat everything, honey, you just have to taste it.' And it's that tasting little by little by little that gets kids more familiar with the food and more comfortable with it and more likely to eat it the next time.
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Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now, the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions.
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Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.
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The overarching conventional wisdom - what everyone from government experts to my French girlfriends take as articles of faith - is that restrictive diets generally don't make you healthier or slimmer. Instead, it's best to eat a variety of high-quality foods in moderation and pay attention to whether you're hungry.
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Before Donald Trump took office, optimism about his presidency was the lowest of any president-elect since at least the 1970s.
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When I moved to Europe 12 years ago, my biggest concern was whether I'd ever speak decent French. Practically every American I knew came to visit, many saying they dreamed of living here, too.