Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

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.

A family stitched together with love seldom unravels.

I used to anticipate my childhood birthday parties as if each were an annual coronation. Like most kids, I loved sitting at the head of the table with a crown on my head.

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.

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

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.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

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

As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son’s future are counting on me.

I find it profoundly symbolic that I am appearing before a committee of fifteen men who will report to a legislative body of one hundred men because of a decision handed down by a court comprised of nine men–on an issue that affects millions of women…. I have the feeling that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn’t be struggling for this legislation. If men could get pregnant, maternity benefits would be as sacrosanct as the G.I. Bill.

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?

I want to visit Memory Lane, I don’t want to live there.