Quotes by Alissa Quart - Page 2

Even as a child, I had walked down streets reading novels, waiting for my feet to get stuck in tar as I crossed the road, like the absent-minded animal in a Richard Scarry kid's book.
Alissa Quart /
Streets
Stuck
Crossed
Tar
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Include
Infants
Metaphors
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Crucial
Deluge
Harassment
Income
Income Inequality
Inequality
Tales
Truism
Exploit
Feeds
Sexual
Hidden
Holds
Copy Quote
There's no better example of how to lead a difficult employee than to have a child. You have another kind of knowledge from your children that's actually applicable outside of childbearing.
Alissa Quart /
Employee
Applicable
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Conditions
Corporations
Gaps
Inspection
Workplace
Monitor
Overseas
Reveal
Violations
Copy Quote
Actors and writers and adjuncts are always looking for their next job: they find common cause with the female Uber drivers on contracts who have also been unprotected victims of sexual harassment.
Alissa Quart /
Contracts
Drivers
Female
Harassment
Uber
Common Cause
Writers
Sexual
Unprotected
Victims
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Behavior
Neuroscience
Reactions
Understanding
Useful
Nuances
Terms
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Criticism
Joining
Derive
Copy Quote
Like Hipster Racism, Hipster Sexism is a distancing gesture, a belief that, simply by applying quotations, uncool, questionable, and even offensive material about women can be alchemically transformed.
Alissa Quart /
Offensive
Questionable
Quotations
Sexism
Transformed
Applying
Gesture
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Expectancy
Happy Things
Life Expectancy
Plans
Retirement
Sad Things
Social Security
Life Sad People
More People
Social Security Benefits
Copy Quote
While households that make anywhere from $48,000 to $250,000 can call themselves middle class, to group such a wide range of incomes under one label, as politicians love to do, is to confuse the term entirely.
Alissa Quart /
Middle Class
Range
Wide
Confuse
Entirely
Households
Incomes
Label
Wide Range
Copy Quote
There is a psychological and physical toll from the pressure to recreate ourselves in midlife. To survive as workers, we have to deny, on some level, the realities of our bodies - bodies that age and give birth.
Alissa Quart /
Birth
Deny
Psychological
Workers
Bodies
Realities
Recreate
To Survive
Copy Quote
Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.
Alissa Quart /
Luxurious
Medieval
Neighborhood
Aristocrat
Homes
Next Door
Overall
Private Schools
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Dakota
North Dakota
Bell
Duties
Heading
Houses
Rent
Copy Quote
When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother's high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm.
Alissa Quart /
Aspiration
Blue
Boots
Arm
Carrying
Synonymous
Young Child
Copy Quote
On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites' emphasis on words such as 'connection,' 'community,' and 'choice.' Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference.
Alissa Quart /
Emphasis
Vocabulary
Big Difference
Egalitarian
Public Schools
Websites
Copy Quote
I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.
Alissa Quart /
Miles
Davis
Folk
Parker
Copy Quote
I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, 'Do what you love.' On an existential level, they might have done their best by us, but I think, in terms of the reality principle, maybe less so.
Alissa Quart /
Existential
What You Love
Do What You Love
Principle
Copy Quote
Although federal law prohibits companies with 15 or more employees from discriminating against pregnant job seekers, it can be quite hard for an ordinary woman to land a job if she lets prospective bosses know she is pregnant.
Alissa Quart /
Ordinary
Pregnant
Seekers
Bosses
Discriminating
Employees
Lets
Prospective
Copy Quote
Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.
Alissa Quart /
Arithmetic
Avant Garde
Bourgeois
Excess
Mute
Advanced
Decorative
Overly
Imagined
Minds
Personal
Piercing
Technical
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Colleagues
Employers
Flexible
Motherhood
Range
Workplace
World Way More
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Consultants
Homework
Public Education
Stay At Home
Education Parents Children
Addition
Education Children Parents
Costly
Prep
Supplement
Tutors
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Attend
Colleges
Networks
Divisions
Greatly
Institutional
Social Networks
Universities
Copy Quote
Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted - private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training - edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.
Alissa Quart /
Activity
Divides
Elements
Schooling
Home Schooling
Copy Quote
Having been built in the fashion I was as a child - created and then deflated - has left me with a distinct feeling of failure. Because I did not live up to my precocity, I experience it to be like a cross between a has-been and a never-was.
Alissa Quart /
Cross
Distinct
Has-Been
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Affluent
Housing
Location
Proverbial
Residents
Entrance
City Day Every Day
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Mockery
Objectification
Paradox
Sexism
Border
Consists
Manner
Marks
Quotation
Uses
Copy Quote
Part of why daycare is so poorly paid is because the sense that they're prisoners of love, that daycare workers love their work so much that they don't need to be paid fairly. It's this sense of, 'Oh well, labor and love are two different things.'
Alissa Quart /
Different Things
Labor
Workers
Fairly
Poorly
Prisoners
Copy Quote
When I got pregnant with my daughter, both my husband and I were freelancers, and we didn't have that much security. We had savings. We were better off than many people, but we didn't have, you know, pensions and all the things that people used to have.
Alissa Quart /
Better Off
Pregnant
Better People Know
Pensions
Copy Quote
'Mr. Robot,' in particular, signals the rise of a fresh post-Occupy portrayal of the wealth gap. No longer is the story of income inequity delivered via a well-meaning, crushingly earnest indie film by John Sayles or in a single laugh line on 'Roseanne.'
Alissa Quart /
Earnest
Income
Portrayal
Signals
Mr
Delivered
Gap
Indie
Indie Film
Robot
Via
Well-Meaning
Copy Quote
'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.
Alissa Quart /
High Quality
Mary
Middle Class
Pinching
Purple
Rite
Silver
Stride
Toes
Flowers
Occasionally
Private Schools
Public Schools
Sending
Copy Quote
Instead of working to give robots personhood status, we should concentrate on protecting our human workers. If that means developing a more cooperative approach to ownership of autonomous trucks so millions of drivers are not left out in the literal cold, so be it.
Alissa Quart /
Autonomous
Developing
Drivers
Literal
Ownership
Personhood
Robots
Workers
Cooperative
Protecting
Status
Trucks
Copy Quote
In an economy where women now make up half the work force, we're going to have to address the treatment of pregnant employees more systemically. The passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would better protect against the discrimination pregnant job seekers face.
Alissa Quart /
Discrimination
Fairness
Pregnant
Seekers
Treatment
Workers
Employees
Make Up
Passage
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Critique
Dissecting
Offers
Would Be
Civic
Falsehoods
Ignores
Prying
Copy Quote
There's a motherhood penalty because we've been long taught things that are stigmatized about motherhood. As workers, we don't want to talk about our kids at work. We're afraid to, or that when we leave at 5:30 to relieve the sitter we're somehow going to be diminished.
Alissa Quart /
Motherhood
Taught
Workers
Afraid
Diminished
Leave
Penalty
Relieve
Sitter
Somehow
Copy Quote
If we could support school curricula about social class, we might discuss the full complexity of 'wealth' within the parameters of our children's educational lives. Out of these lesson plans, we might talk more about what society values - and whether it rewards the right things.
Alissa Quart /
Complexity
Educational
Parameters
Plans
Rewards
Social Class
Discuss
Lesson
Right Things
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Dystopian
Fabric
Solutions
Sprung
Net
Require
Sites
Social Fabric
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Corporate
Crime
Excess
Injustice
Rustic
Civic
Racial
Rites
Vacations
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Advertising
Lyrical
New Technology
Transforming
Copy Quote
There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there's a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.
Alissa Quart /
American Cities
Cult
Edges
Encounters
Marginalized
Middle Class
Overwork
Urban
Workers
Caste
Centers
Due
Estate
Exploited
Real Estate
Restaurant
Systems
Copy Quote
Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don't challenge today's stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation's experience of an even more important class - the kind in which they learn. And that's one thing we simply can't afford.
Alissa Quart /
Experience
Class
Mysterious
One Thing
Social
Social Class
Today
Warp
Afford
Around
Both
Challenge
Simply
Generation
Learn
Status
Copy Quote
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.
Alissa Quart /
Anxious
Decades
Facility
Logic
Mom And Dad
Old Age
Accomplishments
Mom Age Dad
Economically
Age Dad Mom
Insurance
Copy Quote
Uber is hardly the first company to exploit the financial vulnerability of teachers - and the desperation of public schools more broadly - to score PR points. Amazon, Boeing, Bank of America, and other corporations have played the part of school benefactor, offering everything from reward programs to school supplies.
Alissa Quart /
Corporations
Desperation
Financial
Offering
Score
Supplies
Uber
Vulnerability
Teachers
Played
Bank
Benefactor
Exploit
Hardly
Programs
Public Schools
Reward
Schools
Copy Quote
When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women's magazine or teen girl magazine and say, 'I'd never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.' But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.
Alissa Quart /
Teen
Branded
Spread
Starving
Magazine
Outfit
Teenagers
Copy Quote
As the world of independent feature filmmaking became increasingly commercialized by the mid-1990s, there was also a parallel, much more positive development: a resurgence in documentary filmmaking, thanks in part to the advent of the cheaper, lighter digital format that helped to offset the daunting costs of pursuing political aims through film.
Alissa Quart /
Advent
Cheaper
Filmmaking
Format
Resurgence
Thanks
Aims
Daunting
Documentary
Feature
Increasingly
Lighter
Offset
Parallel
Pursuing
Copy Quote

Related Authors

Socrates
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist
Wednesday, May 25, 1803
Thursday, Apr 27, 1882
Helen Keller
Author
Sunday, Jun 27, 1880
Saturday, Jun 01, 1968
Lucy Larcom
Poet
Friday, Mar 05, 1824
Monday, Apr 17, 1893
Edgar Allan Poe
Author
Thursday, Jan 19, 1809
Sunday, Oct 07, 1849
Peter Drucker
Author
Friday, Nov 19, 1909
Friday, Nov 11, 2005
George Bernard Shaw
Playwright
Saturday, Jul 26, 1856
Thursday, Nov 02, 1950
H. L. Mencken
Journalist
Sunday, Sep 12, 1880
Sunday, Jan 29, 1956
Will Rogers
Actor
Tuesday, Nov 04, 1879
Thursday, Aug 15, 1935
George Carlin
Comedian
Wednesday, May 12, 1937
Sunday, Jun 22, 2008
Elon Musk
Investor
Monday, Jun 28, 1971
Vince Lombardi
Football Player
Wednesday, Jun 11, 1913
Thursday, Sep 03, 1970
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Philosopher
Stephen Covey
Author
Monday, Oct 24, 1932
Monday, Jul 16, 2012
Thomas Sowell
Economist
Monday, Jun 30, 1930

View All Quotes

Top Authors

George Carlin
Comedian
Wednesday, May 12, 1937
Sunday, Jun 22, 2008
Muhammad Ali
Professional Boxer
Saturday, Jan 17, 1942
Friday, Jun 03, 2016
Oscar Wilde
Writer
Monday, Oct 16, 1854
Friday, Nov 30, 1900
John C. Maxwell
Author
Thursday, Feb 20, 1947
Steven Wright
Comedian
Tuesday, Dec 06, 1955
Carrie Fisher
Actress
Sunday, Oct 21, 1956
Tuesday, Dec 27, 2016
Yogi Berra
Baseball Manager
Tuesday, May 12, 1925
Tuesday, Sep 22, 2015
Heraclitus
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Vince Lombardi
Football Player
Wednesday, Jun 11, 1913
Thursday, Sep 03, 1970
Ernest Hemingway
Author
Friday, Jul 21, 1899
Sunday, Jul 02, 1961
Aristotle
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Writer
Thursday, Aug 28, 1749
Thursday, Mar 22, 1832
Jean De La Bruyere
Wednesday, Aug 16, 1645
Thursday, May 10, 1696
Deepak Chopra
Author
Wednesday, Oct 22, 1947
George Bernard Shaw
Playwright
Saturday, Jul 26, 1856
Thursday, Nov 02, 1950

View All Authors

Alissa Quart Quotes - Page 2

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page