Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Because the designers at Baby Gap and Crew Cuts have determined it would be cute if kids dressed like their dads, seemingly every American male between 2 and 52 dresses identically. "

Rumaan Alam

Cute

Baby

American

Related Quotes:

" Nothing is ever ideal. You have to work all the same. "

" Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise. "

" Contemporary families can be made in many ways. You might step up when relatives or friends are unable to meet their obligation to their children. You might marry someone who is already a parent. Or you might, as in my case, yearn to create a family and decide to adopt. "

" I know I've had a charmed experience of being a parent, with healthy kids, a helpful partner, access to good day care, and great public schools. "

" I think it's a not-uncommon experience for gay boys, young men, and even older men to spend a lot of time in the company of women. "

" I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like. "

Rumaan Alam

Liberty

Live

" I'm not black myself, but my sons are. "

" When you are young, it's deeply annoying to be told that certain things are a condition of your youth. There's almost always some condescension in the proposition that your reality, your hopes, your frustrations, are just a condition of your age, that what feels unique to you is a very common thing after all. "

" Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner. "

" Wishing there were more children's books like 'The Snowy Day' is a bit like wishing there were more grownup books like 'Anna Karenina.' There are only so many masterpieces out there. "

Rumaan Alam

Children

Day

" Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon. "

" Every sense has the power to transport us through time, but it's taste I find the most mysterious, and writing about it often results in tortured metaphors. "

Rumaan Alam

Power

Time

" One of the many American ideals that make no sense at all is that we're all a million rugged individualists marching in lockstep. We dress accordingly, at least the men. If it's always been thus, I yearn for the halcyon days of the man in the gray flannel suit because at least that guy had some flair. "

" When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that. "

" Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before. "

" I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page. "

" It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination. "

" Family is whatever you say it is. "

" I've spent many hours of my life browsing in stores. At 21, I admired clothes I couldn't afford. At 30, I bought them. At 40, I sometimes go simply for the pleasure, of seeing what is new, of learning what counts as beautiful now. "

" Writer's block is a fiction. "

" That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance. "

" I do think that I have a sensitivity to the depictions of maybe all minorities in literature. And I think that the experience of people who look like me is so rarely captured in big, mainstream American fiction that you tend to sort of empathize with any character of color who pops up. "

" Subtlety doesn't work with kids. "

" I grew up in the D.C. suburbs, and what I like about that place is that there's not a strong regional affect in the cultural imagination like there is in Dallas or San Francisco or New York City. You have a little more freedom as a novelist this way. The suburbs become a generic idea, and the place doesn't intrude into the narrative. "

" Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader. "

" Usually, when you see clothes on a model, by some transitive property, that garment is imbued with her beauty. "

" I didn't know, at 22, that regret is useless. If I could go back and change something - give myself some big break, pass along some secret information, reassure myself that most things would, in fact, work out - I don't think I would. "

Rumaan Alam

Myself

Work

" It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives. "

" History is a story like any other, but black history is a story so devoid of logic that it frustrates the young reader. The young readers in my house, told of slavery and segregation, asked in disbelief, 'What? Why?' We - the parents of black children, the parents of all children - still need to tell that story. "

" With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women. "