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Your child probably won't get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it.
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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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I'm not an early adopter. I'll only start wearing new styles of clothing once they're practically out of date, and I won't move into a neighborhood until it's fully saturated with upscale coffee shops.
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When my mother in Florida mentions that she's off to play golf, I think: Golf? In the age of Trump?
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You know you're in your 40s when you've spent 48 hours trying to think of a word, and that word was 'hemorrhoids.'
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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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It's refreshing to have some time off from wondering whether I look fat.
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One of the great joys of a creative life is that your observations and loose moments aren't lost forever; they live in your work.
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I think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.
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I'm a third-generation Miamian. I'm fond of it. I'm an expatriate, so it's the only American city I can still legitimately claim.
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I've never gotten a good idea while checking Twitter or shopping.
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Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, and get your period, your driver's license, and your diploma. Then, in your 20s and 30s, you romance potential partners, find jobs, and learn to support yourself.
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A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made.
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Just do what you want more often. Don't be so worried about what other people expect.
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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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I had applied to become French - or, rather, Franco-American, as I'm now a dual citizen - partly because I could: I'd lived and paid taxes here for long enough.
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In your 40s, you kind of know how things are likely to go, and you're better at saying, 'You know what? That just doesn't suit me...' I remember thinking in my 30s, 'I should go to Burning Man. I could be a Burning Man person.' And in my 40s, I'm like, 'You know what? I'm never going to go to Burning Man.'
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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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Having lived in America and France, I've been on both sides of the picky-eating divide.
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Certain woman will be jealous of how skinny you are, no matter what's causing it.
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Every time I pass a cafe, I imagine it being stormed by men with Kalashnikovs.
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I'm always hoping no one is following me around with a camera.
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Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame.
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Parisians won't admit that they go to the gym, let alone that they're scared of terrorists.