Nancy Pelosi Quotes

There are many more women who identify as unique people as well as mothers, or instead of as mothers, than there used to be and, hopefully, there are more men who identify as fathers.

I am my father's daughter. It was not up to me growing up. I was his hunting and fishing buddy, so I've been shooting my whole life.

When I was growing up - say in the fifties - the thirties to me didn't even exist. I couldn't even imagine them in any kind of way, so I don't expect anyone growing up now is gonna even understand what the sixties were all about, anymore than I could the thirties or twenties.

When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she was having coffee in the middle of the afternoon with her three sisters. And they would talk about men. I absorbed a lot of that.

When I was younger it was - you know, my dad dressed up in drag on 'Bosom Buddies.' And that was what I was having to deal with at the time. And then around the time that I was into college was when he became statue-worthy I guess you could say.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother 'worked' at anything besides raising her children.

My father was a great innovator in public life, but when it came to raising his daughters, no one could have been more conservative.

I wouldn't say I'm a mummy's girl, but I have grown to have a tremendous appreciation of her as a woman. I was very much a daddy's girl.

I wasn't like a Fifties dad.

Though my grandmother had picked up modern ideas in America, she still had some conflicting 19th-century Irish notions. She believed that daughters, educated though they may be, should continue to live at home until they were married.

I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.

I grew up with brothers in real life.

My parents had an inter-reli'gious marriage. My father is a Gujarati and my mother a Bohri Muslim. I am an only child. My par'ents loved me very much, but were very strict: I was a tomboy, always among boys, playing, fighting.

The way I'm raising my kids is so different than the way I was raised.

My parents did their best - that earns a lot of forgiveness. But they say children grow up in spite of their parents, and I think I did.

Fathers and sons are much more considerate of one another than mothers and daughters.

The world was very feminine when I was young. And now it's very masculine.

I talked to my mother about it a lot. I asked her what it was like to grow up in New York and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and I asked her about a woman leaving her husband. I asked her about how she would feel about that woman, and my mother grew up in the Church Of God In Christ, and she told me that the woman might be isolated because the other women thought she might go and come after their husbands. That's how they thought then.

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

When the boomers started to have kids reach adolescence, there was suddenly this feeling that they needed to protect their kids from all the same things they did when they were kids. Which I guess is a natural tendency, but it makes for a less fun society.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

No one was ever good enough for anybody's precious sons. No one ever called daughters precious, and why was that? Things had not changed very much. In the end women like Emily and Ingrid and Freya and Joanna only had one another to lean on. The men were wonderful when they were around, but their fires burned too bright, they lived too close to the sun - look what happened to her boy, and to her man. Gone. Women only had one another in the end.

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.

The thing to remember about fathers is, they're men. A girl has to keep it in mind: They are dragon seekers, bent on improbable rescues. Scratch any father, you find someone chock - full of qualms and romantic terrors, believing change is a threat - like your first shoes with heels on, like your first bicycle I took such months to get.

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.