Alissa Quart Quotes

Alissa Quart is an American author, journalist, and poet. She has written extensively on social and cultural issues, exploring topics such as inequality, work, and family dynamics. Quart's thought-provoking and incisive writing has contributed to important discussions on contemporary society.

I grew up in New York City and in London.... -Alissa Quart

I grew up in New York City and in London.

While more people are working later in life because of happy things like longer life expectancy, they are also doing so because of very sad things, like a lack of Social Security benefits or retirement plans.

Crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe are in themselves not evil. But the fact that we have to rely on them to pay for our basics is.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

There is a psychological and physical toll from the pressure to recreate ourselves in midlife. To survive as workers, we have to deny, on some level, the realities of our bodies - bodies that age and give birth.

As consumers, we can pressure corporations both to monitor and improve workplace conditions overseas - when inspections reveal violations, these companies should address the gaps immediately.

I think there's a contempt for care work and caregiving in this country that seeps into how we think about mothers, professional workers who are mothers.

Mothers suffer in the workplace. That fact is by now so painfully familiar it even has a name: the motherhood penalty.

Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities.

The Southern California arena rock, hair metal, laidback hippie garden culture - for many growing up in the '70s and '80s, none of it made us who we were like Lou Reed did.

Like politics, all status is ultimately local - pe... -Alissa Quart

Like politics, all status is ultimately local - people compare themselves to those they live near.

When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women's magazine or teen girl magazine and say, 'I'd never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.' But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.

Uber is hardly the first company to exploit the financial vulnerability of teachers - and the desperation of public schools more broadly - to score PR points. Amazon, Boeing, Bank of America, and other corporations have played the part of school benefactor, offering everything from reward programs to school supplies.

Economically anxious, many parents see their children's accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay for the assisted-living facility in a few decades.

There are actually very few deeply 'gifted' kids w... -Alissa Quart

There are actually very few deeply 'gifted' kids with transcendent cognitive or artistic abilities.

Parenting makes us better in so many regards.... -Alissa Quart

Parenting makes us better in so many regards.

Discovering the context

The experience of parenting has positive impacts and helps individuals improve in various aspects of life.

There is a set of emotions around money and new technology and advertising and that sort of thing, and there is this kind of changing, transforming way we go through the world happening. The lyrical eye, the perspective of poetry, can get to something like this when other forms of writing can't.

Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place, what I have called America's dystopian social net. That is, we now require private solutions to what are public problems.

Even as a child, I had walked down streets reading novels, waiting for my feet to get stuck in tar as I crossed the road, like the absent-minded animal in a Richard Scarry kid's book.

The effect of robotization would be profoundly different if, say, truckers possessed their own autonomous vehicles rather than a corporation controlling them all.

Precariousness is not just a working-class thing.... -Alissa Quart

Precariousness is not just a working-class thing.

For the rich and powerful, pregnancy might not be an obstacle - it might even help one's career. But for the rest of us, it remains a hindrance.

My husband was 50; I was in my late 30s. We had lived adulthoods that did not include infants, except as metaphors. And then, like so many in today's America, we had a baby in later life.

Going in and out of a proverbial 'poor door' - a separate entrance for income-restricted residents of mixed-income housing - of your city every day has its costs, even if the 'poor door' woman would be considered affluent in another location.

Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don't challenge today's stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation's experience of an even more important class - the kind in which they learn. And that's one thing we simply can't afford.

If everybody is a Facebook friend, what is an actu... -Alissa Quart

If everybody is a Facebook friend, what is an actual friend?

There's a motherhood penalty because we've been long taught things that are stigmatized about motherhood. As workers, we don't want to talk about our kids at work. We're afraid to, or that when we leave at 5:30 to relieve the sitter we're somehow going to be diminished.

When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother's high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm.

Essentially, if you are surrounded by those who 'outrank' you, it is likely to affect your identity in insidious ways.

In 'Ozark,' the truism that we are not as likely to do as well as our parents did in the past is front and center.

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