Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Control is a big issue when you're sick. It's the first thing you lose — other losses come later.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Her [mother's] constant care blurs into the maternal mists while his [father's] few alcohol rubs are as memorable as if they were anointments by a prophet.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Why hope to live a long life if we're only going to fill it with self-absorption, body maintenance and image repair? When we die, do we want people to exclaim 'She looked ten years younger,' or do we want them to say 'She lived a great life'?

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody — doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.

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

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy.

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

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
To me, a person's identity is composed of both an 'I' and a 'we.' The 'I' finds itself in love, work, and pleasure, but it also locates itself within some meaningful group identity — a tribe, a community, a 'we.' America is too big and bland a tribe for most of us.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
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.

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

Letty Cottin Pogrebin