Quotes from Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.

Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.

When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol.

People tend to be exquisitely precise when describing pain. We don't just say it hurts, we say it throbs or aches; it's a burning, wrenching, gnawing sensation; it's sharp or dull; it chafes; it stings. But where pain specifies, joy generalizes. It was great! we say. Terrific! Beautiful! Fantastic!

Friends can be said to fall in like with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.

My best years aren't behind me; they're within me.

a whisperer of Yiddish—the lingua franca spoken by Jewish immigrants when they didn't want their American children to understand what they were saying

Now I think people today should envy any of us who lived through the early seventies. It was such a time of hope and possibility, and ferment, and progress, and change, and media attention, and brilliant activist women everywhere you turned.

We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight.

Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies.

A family stitched together with love seldom unravels.

When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol.

Friendships aren't perfect, and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release.

Boys don't make passes at female smart-asses.

Like plowing, housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer cans litter the living room. The family isn't likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn't remember to buy eggs, milk, or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish.

We can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict.

No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife.

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable — each segment distinct.