I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.
Letty Cottin PogrebinWhy 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 PogrebinIt's smart to be friends with one's sex partner but dumb to have sex with one's friends.
Letty Cottin PogrebinWhen a family is free of abuse and oppression, it can be the place where we share our deepest secrets and stand the most exposed, a place where we learn to feel distinct without being better, - and sacrifice for others without losing ourselves.
Letty Cottin PogrebinWe need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.
Letty Cottin PogrebinIn the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin