Alissa Quart Quotes

My parents wanted me to be a teacher. Because I could work most of the year and pursue the things that I love to do during the summer. It just seemed like a good plan.

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.

I grew up in the South Bronx in the 1970s. My dad worked in IT, and my mom was a teacher.

I grew up in a family with three siblings. My parents were always very supportive and encouraging. It was important for them that we have meaningful and satisfying professions, but they didn't care as much about success and achievement.

Right from growing up I always wanted to be a teacher, but my dad discouraged me.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.

I'm essentially a momma's boy with a good education.

My earliest memories are of my father explaining to me the American Dream and how he expected me to do better than he did.

I'm probably a little more like my dad. But because of my mom, I never saw being a woman as being an impediment to being able to do something. She had her Ph.D. before I was born.

To my father, business was the highest calling, but to my mother, medicine was the top profession.

I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children - I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife.

I grew up listening to oldies, like Motown. That's from my mom.

I work because I want to work. Work keeps me going.

When I was growing up, there was still that narrative of 'you finish school, you go and get married, you become somebody's wife and you get kids and tend to them.' I think it is really important to reach for something.

My mother is a special education teacher but also an artist, and my father an advertising executive. They are about as wacky as you can get without being alcoholics.

Mostly I've been inspired by my mother. She is extremely driven and always makes every endeavour sound exciting. I think most of the things I've accomplished are a result of knowing her.

When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of 'The Wind in the Willows,' which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

I know I'm never going to be as successful as my dad, but I get bored doing nothing. I couldn't go from vacation to vacation and have no motivation.

My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.

My mom is a teacher, my dad was a writer for television, his dad was a writer for television, and combining those two has been sort of the goal of my life.

My parents are both teachers, so we had the summers off.

I looked at my mom and her life, and I thought, 'I don't want that.' I don't think my mom wanted it, either. I think my mom did want to be out there and have a career. She loved working. As soon as we were old enough to feed ourselves, she was out.

I know that I'm in the minority to be able to keep working all these years. But I want more!

My mother taught us to play baseball, to bake a cake, to play fair - she beat the living daylights out of us sometimes, and she loved us with all her heart; she taught her favorite poets, and there is no child care in the world that will ever be a substitute for what that lady was in our life.