Top 55 Pamela Druckerman Quotes

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.

French children seem to be able to play by themselves in a way.

One of the many problems with parenting is that kids keep changing. Just when you’re used to one stage, they zoom into another.

I’m not an early adopter. I’ll only start wearing new styles of clothing once they’re practically out of date, and I won’t move into a neighborhood until it’s fully saturated with upscale coffee shops.

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

In my 40s, I expect to finally reap the average-looking girl’s revenge. I’ve entered the stage of life where you don’t need to be beautiful; simply by being well-preserved and not obese, I would now pass for pretty.

The French talk about education, the education of their children. They don’t talk about raising kids. They talk about education. And that has nothing to do with school. It’s this kind of broad description of how you raise children and what you teach them.

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

Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, and get your period, your driver’s license, and your diploma. Then, in your 20s and 30s, you romance potential partners, find jobs, and learn to support yourself.

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

The question on my husband’s birthday is always, What do you get for the man who has nothing?

The French view is really one of balance, I think… What French women would tell me over and over is, it’s very important that no part of your life – not being a mom, not being a worker, not being a wife – overwhelms the other part.

When people used to ask me what I missed about America, I would say, ‘The optimism.’ I grew up in the land of hope, then moved to one whose catchphrases are ‘It’s not possible’ and ‘Hell is other people.’ I walked around Paris feeling conspicuously chipper.

I was scared to say I was in my 40s because at that point, it sounded really old, and to out myself as a middle-aged human – I felt very awkward about it.

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.

There’s an American idea that you want to look as young as you can for as long as you can. If you can be mistaken for a teenager from behind into your 50s, then you’ve won; you’ve succeeded.

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.

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

How hard or easy it is to raise kids, especially while working, is a big part of people’s well-being everywhere.

Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now, the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions.

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.

Parisiennes rarely walk around wearing the giant diamonds that are de rigueur in certain New York neighborhoods.

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.

My family was once invited to lunch at a chateau owned by a friend of a friend. As we drove our rental car up to the giant castle, my kids gasped and said, ‘They must be rich!’

I don’t like rules, because rules, you have to follow.

If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a French cafe. It’s like a public referendum on your face.

In the English books, the American kids’ books, typically, there is a problem, the characters grapple with that problem, and the problem is resolved.

Optimism – even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty – has long been an American hallmark.

My husband is so upset by President Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants and Muslims, he refuses to even visit the United States.

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.

And as a mother of three with a full-time job, podcasts gave me the illusion of having a vibrant social life. I was constantly ‘meeting’ new people. My favorite hosts started to seem like friends: I could detect small shifts in their moods and tell when they were flirting with guests.

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 always hoping no one is following me around with a camera.

It’s refreshing to have some time off from wondering whether I look fat.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.

In your 40s, you kind of know how things are likely to go, and you’re better at saying, ‘You know what? That just doesn’t suit me…’ I remember thinking in my 30s, ‘I should go to Burning Man. I could be a Burning Man person.’ And in my 40s, I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m never going to go to Burning Man.’

This idea – that the only way to mend the relationship post-affair is through therapy – is unique to the American script.

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

There’s this idea in America that you can be whatever you want. That remains an ideal in terms of how you dress too – when you go shopping, you try on all possible selves and then decide.

Just do what you want more often. Don’t be so worried about what other people expect.

I’ve got letters from all over the world saying what you’re describing as American parenting is Chilean middle-class parenting, or it is Finnish middle-class parenting, or it is Slovak middle-class parenting.

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

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

It’s fine to discuss money in France, as long as you’re complaining that you don’t have enough, or boasting about getting a bargain.

Certain woman will be jealous of how skinny you are, no matter what’s causing it.

I think kids in France, and certainly in my household, don’t necessarily stop interrupting when you tell them, but they gradually become more aware of other people, and that means that you can have the expectation of finishing a conversation.

Soon after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I got a letter from France’s interior ministry informing me that I was now French. By the time it arrived, I’d been French for nearly two weeks without even knowing it.

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