Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality. "

Pamela Druckerman

Related Quotes:

" 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.' "

Pamela Druckerman

" When my kids correct my cultural missteps, I sometimes suspect that they're not embarrassed, they're gleeful. "

Pamela Druckerman

" 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. "

Pamela Druckerman

" Eating among the French certainly affected me. After a few years here, I gave up most of my selective food habits. "

Pamela Druckerman

" I've never gotten a good idea while checking Twitter or shopping. "

Pamela Druckerman

" Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now, the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions. "

Pamela Druckerman

" 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. "

Pamela Druckerman

" I spend much of my free time listening to podcasts of American comedians talking to each other. "

Pamela Druckerman

" Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice. "

Pamela Druckerman

" Get rid of the idea of kids' food. Kids can eat whatever adults can eat. You know, there is one dinner, and everyone has the same thing. "

Pamela Druckerman

" 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.' "

Pamela Druckerman

" Where Americans might coo over a child's most inane remark to boost his confidence, middle-class French parents teach their kids to be concise and amusing, to keep everyone listening. "

Pamela Druckerman

" We're understandably worried that staring at screens all day, and blogging about our breakfasts, is turning America into a nation of narcissists. But the opposite might be true. "

Pamela Druckerman

" While I love walking past those beautifully lit bookstores in my neighborhood, what I mostly buy there are blank notebooks and last-minute presents for children's birthdays. "

Pamela Druckerman

" When I was 41, I had a very bad back pain, and it turned out to be Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. "

Pamela Druckerman

" 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. "

Pamela Druckerman

" 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. "

Pamela Druckerman

" When you're the foreigner and your kids are the natives, they realize you're clueless much sooner than they ordinarily would. I'm pretty sure mine skipped the Mommy-is-infallible stage entirely. "

Pamela Druckerman

" Optimism - even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty - has long been an American hallmark. "

Pamela Druckerman

" Having lived in America and France, I've been on both sides of the picky-eating divide. "

Pamela Druckerman

" 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. "

Pamela Druckerman

" It's refreshing to have some time off from wondering whether I look fat. "

Pamela Druckerman

" One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what's really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves. "

Pamela Druckerman

" Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London. "

Pamela Druckerman

" 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. "

Pamela Druckerman

" If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a French cafe. It's like a public referendum on your face. "

Pamela Druckerman

" 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. "

Pamela Druckerman

" I've been vacationing in western North Carolina and northern Georgia since I was a kid. I arrive, marvel at the mountains, and put on an unconvincing Southern drawl. "

Pamela Druckerman

" The French talk about education, the education of their children. They don't talk about raising kids. They talk about education. And that has nothing to do with school. It's this kind of broad description of how you raise children and what you teach them. "

Pamela Druckerman

" The French aren't known for being hilarious. When I told Parisians I was interested in French humor, they'd say 'French what?' "

Pamela Druckerman