Quotes from Alissa Quart

Motherhood gives you access to a range of different intellectual experiences and ways of seeing the world, which, in a way, makes you more flexible in the workplace. But our employers, our colleagues, don't necessarily understand.

Mothers suffer in the workplace. That fact is by now so painfully familiar it even has a name: the motherhood penalty.

As consumers, we can pressure corporations both to monitor and improve workplace conditions overseas - when inspections reveal violations, these companies should address the gaps immediately.

'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.

Parenting makes us better in so many regards.

Giftedness gives you this amazing tool kit for handling self-discipline and gives you an area of knowledge, but then it also gives you this weird set of aspirations.

Crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe are in themselves not evil. But the fact that we have to rely on them to pay for our basics is.

For the rich and powerful, pregnancy might not be an obstacle - it might even help one's career. But for the rest of us, it remains a hindrance.

I'm just a reporter.

One thing we're doing with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the nonprofit I direct, is providing financial support to journalists who were formerly middle-class.

Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.

Teaching has always been a poorly paid profession, particularly considering its educational requirements and responsibilities.

Going in and out of a proverbial 'poor door' - a separate entrance for income-restricted residents of mixed-income housing - of your city every day has its costs, even if the 'poor door' woman would be considered affluent in another location.

My father made me who I am; he was incredibly intellectually generous.

Brand loyalty starts in the cradle and ends in the grave, as I wrote in my first book, 'Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.'

There are actually very few deeply 'gifted' kids with transcendent cognitive or artistic abilities.

There is a set of emotions around money and new technology and advertising and that sort of thing, and there is this kind of changing, transforming way we go through the world happening. The lyrical eye, the perspective of poetry, can get to something like this when other forms of writing can't.

Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.

I was just a bright, driven kid.

The daily deluge of tales of lechery and trauma holds a hidden but crucial truism: sexual harassment routinely feeds on income inequality. After all, it's much harder to exploit an equal.

In 'Ozark,' the truism that we are not as likely to do as well as our parents did in the past is front and center.

At the end of the day, the truth is that if - when - robots prevail, so many vocations will actually become close to impossible. Save for the profession of making robots, that is.

While more people are working later in life because of happy things like longer life expectancy, they are also doing so because of very sad things, like a lack of Social Security benefits or retirement plans.

Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place, what I have called America's dystopian social net. That is, we now require private solutions to what are public problems.