Quotes from Alissa Quart

My husband was 50; I was in my late 30s. We had lived adulthoods that did not include infants, except as metaphors. And then, like so many in today's America, we had a baby in later life.

The middle class is a group defined by more than just money: it also leans on credentials, education, aspirations, assets, and, of course, household income.

The people who talk about the middle class aren't upholding their interests in the legislature.

The list of costly services that supplement some children's public education is growing longer and now includes consultants, tutors, and test prep. That's in addition to the homework help some stay-at-home parents can afford to provide.

The Southern California arena rock, hair metal, laidback hippie garden culture - for many growing up in the '70s and '80s, none of it made us who we were like Lou Reed did.

I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school, and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it.

There are schoolteachers around the country that work second jobs after their teaching duties are done: one woman in North Dakota I spoke to was heading off to clean houses after the final bell in order to pay her rent.

I saw my gender - and myself - as something of a construct. Like anyone who read one too many women studies' books in the 1990s, I aspired to both 'do' and undo my sex.

The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world.

I grew up in New York City and in London.

Social networks matter greatly, and our class calibrations are often around what college one attended, leading to gruesome institutional divisions between those who attend, say, community colleges and those who attend top-tier universities.

We in America believe in starting over - and over and over.

Like politics, all status is ultimately local - people compare themselves to those they live near.

To be 'squeezed' is to be bound by a very American psychological and socio-economic predicament. Being squeezed involves one's finances, one's social status, and one's self-image.

Unnatural constructs - cities and medical pain management - have always seemed pretty good to me.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

Economically anxious, many parents see their children's accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay for the assisted-living facility in a few decades.

There are things that neuroscience is useful for in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.

Hipster Sexism consists of the objectification of women but in a manner that uses mockery, quotation marks, and paradox: the stuff you learned about in literature class. As funny as Dunham's 'Girls' is, it can definitely border on Hipster Sexism.

Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. It gives expression not just to our rites but also to our problems and even our values; these poems are not about rustic vacations.

Making a movie, under any circumstances, is a highly stressful occupation.

I go to see films at the multiplex because they are not good films, and so I don't have to think about things like death, social oppression, or yes, my fertility, while I watch them.

The effect of robotization would be profoundly different if, say, truckers possessed their own autonomous vehicles rather than a corporation controlling them all.

When I was 13, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground made more sense to me than anything else.