Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Pamela Druckerman - Page 2

One of the great joys of a creative life is that your observations and loose moments aren't lost forever; they live in your work.

The whole point of a commencement speech is to say something encouraging.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

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.

Around my neighborhood, I'm known as the American who talks to her computer while she types.

Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.

Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame.

I'm a third-generation Miamian. I'm fond of it. I'm an expatriate, so it's the only American city I can still legitimately claim.

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.'

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

Parisians won't admit that they go to the gym, let alone that they're scared of terrorists.

A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made.

Every time I pass a cafe, I imagine it being stormed by men with Kalashnikovs.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I guess we're all supposed to get used to living in a more dangerous world.

The overarching conventional wisdom - what everyone from government experts to my French girlfriends take as articles of faith - is that restrictive diets generally don't make you healthier or slimmer. Instead, it's best to eat a variety of high-quality foods in moderation and pay attention to whether you're hungry.

I spent most of my adolescence feeling awkward but never once mentioned it.

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.

Your child probably won't get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it.

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

A lot of French comedy is satire.

As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I've spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken.

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.

I always knew the French had a penchant for criticism and abstract thought. Usually, that just meant they complained a lot.

Like practically everyone who grew up in Miami, I knew little about its history. We were more worried about mangoes falling on our cars.

The main thing my bookcase says about me is that I'm not French.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.

When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.

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

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.

Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.

If you had asked me what I wanted when I was 12 years old, I probably would have said, 'To marry a plastic surgeon.' You can hardly blame me: I was growing up in Miami.

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

Soccer may not explain the world or even contain the world. But it makes the world a slightly happier place.

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.

Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents.

Just because you're 40, you don't have to decide whether God exists...when you're already worrying that the National Security Agency is reading your emails, it's better not to know whether yet another entity is watching you.

The French believe that kids feel confident when they're able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don't praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting things, and for speaking well.

By your 40s, you don't want to be with the cool people; you want to be with your people.

There are no grown-ups....Everyone is winging it, some just do it more confidently.

Your first attempt will be terrible.... Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else's bad first draft..... Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, 'It just flowed out of me,' I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while.

The French aren't perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.

There are no soul mates. Not in the traditional sense, at least. In my 20s someone told me that each person has not one but 30 soul mates walking the earth. (“Yes,” said a colleague, when I informed him of this, “and I’m trying to sleep with all of them.”) In fact, “soul mate” isn’t a pre-existing condition. It’s an earned title. They’re made over time.

There are no grown-ups. We suspect this when we are younger, but can confirm it only once we are the ones writing books and attending parent-teacher conferences. Everyone is winging it, some just do it more confidently.

If you worry less about what people think of you, you can pick up an astonishing amount of information about them. You no longer leave conversations wondering what just happened. Other people's minds and motives are finally revealed.

To be a different kind of parent, you don't just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.

When you're wondering whether she's his daughter or his girlfriend, she's his girlfriend.

You will miss out on some near soul mates. This goes for friendships, too. There will be unforgettable people with whom you have shared an excellent evening or a few days. Now they live in Hong Kong, and you will never see them again. That’s just how life is.

French parents are very concerned about their kids. They know about pedophiles, allergies, and choking hazards. They take reasonable precautions. But they aren't panicked about their children's well-being. This calmer outlook makes them better at both establishing boundaries and giving their kids some autonomy.

To grow up without risk is to risk not growing up.