Letty Quotes & Sayings

We can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself _I can not_, and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a man. — George MacDonald

The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Ash opened the door, stopping the males before they could go in, "Learn some manners."
Letty gave them a salute before walking in, rifle in hand.
"That's rather chauvinistic," one of the males huffed.
Ash let out an amused laugh. "I didn't let her in first because she's female, you jackass. I let her in first because she likes to shoot things, and I'm very considerate that way. — Charlie Cochet

Hospitality is the practice of God's welcome by reaching across difference to participate in God's actions bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis. — Letty M. Russell

Like plowing, housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer cans litter the living room. The family isn't likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn't remember to buy eggs, milk, or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

How can you love me?" she asked, forcing herself to say the words that would kill the tenderness in his eyes. "You don't even know me. You know 'Lady Agatha,' a composite, a character, a role I played."

He shook his head, his negation gentle but certain. "I didn't fall in love with a character, a title, or an occupation. I didn't fall in love with you because of your past or despite it.
"I love you because of your intensity and passion, because you make me want to be better than I am, because seeing my reflection in your eyes makes me better than I am. I love you because you laugh easily and honestly. I love you because you carried an ugly mutt into a drawing room as though it were a prince and because you gave an old soldier a strawberry trifle. I love you, Letty. — Connie Brockway

Apathy is the self-defense of the powerless. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I used to anticipate my childhood birthday parties as if each were an annual coronation. Like most kids, I loved sitting at the head of the table with a crown on my head. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Illness is the proving ground of friendship. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Too easy. Fuck Sloane, marry Dex, kill Ash," Letty said. Sloane's — Charlie Cochet

If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

To me, a person's identity is composed of both an 'I' and a 'we.' The 'I' finds itself in love, work, and pleasure, but it also locates itself within some meaningful group identity - a tribe, a community, a 'we.' America is too big and bland a tribe for most of us. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Society is neither my master nor my servant, neither my father nor my sister; and so long as she does not bar my way to the kingdom of heaven, which is the only society worth getting into, I feel no right to complain of how she treats me. I have no claim on her; I do not acknowledge her laws--hardly her existence, and she has no authority over me. Why should she, how could she, constituted as she is, receive such as me? The moment she did so, she would cease to be what she is; and, if all be true that one hears of her, she does me a kindness in excluding me. What can it matter to me, Letty, whether they call me a lady or not, so long as Jesus says "Daughter" to me? — George MacDonald

It's smart to be friends with one's sex partner but dumb to have sex with one's friends. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Just look, Letty." Miss Blacklock looked. Her eyebrows went up. She threw a quick scrutinizing glance round the table. Then she read the advertisement out loud. "A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6:30 p.m. Friends please accept this, the only intimation. — Agatha Christie

I'm not your gilded prince with the gilded chairs, Letty," Geoff said simply. "I couldn't be if I tried."
"I wouldn't want you to be." Letty's voice felt rusty.
"I'm not particularly bold or dashing or heroic. I'm happier at my desk than in a black cloak. And I've never entirely mastered all the steps of the quadrille." He looked soberly down at her. "But what I am is yours, if you'll still have me. — Lauren Willig

The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Cael, come on. Stop licking the dude. That's gross."

Letty let out a snort. "Please, like you don't lick dudes."

"That's different," Dex explained with a grimace. "None of those dudes were Ash. Besides, last time I checked, Ash was allergic to nuts. — Charlie Cochet

Work-family conflicts
the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child
would not be forced upon women with suchsanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force? — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

The rich rock-star Lothario bullshit drops with a thud, and an air of truth fills the empty space between us. He pins me with those gorgeous emerald eyes. "I dig you, Letty. — Kendall Grey

All this rapture," managed Letty, wriggling out of her mother's grasp, "is decidedly premature. — Lauren Willig

Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in LIFE magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body. — Barbara Kingsolver

The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her "job" is that the children's growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother's indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Next morning, Letty cabbed out to an IHOP in the xeriscaped burbs, several miles west of the glitz of the Strip. The emotion of the previous night still clung. — Blake Crouch

Boys don't make passes at female smart asses. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

She was stone cold and hard as fuck. And that's when I knew, she was a ride or die chick. The Letty to my Dom. I — A. Zavarelli

Mr. Alsworthy!" exclaimed Letty's mother. "How can you laugh at such a matter! Although, I must say, I would have thought if a pirate were to kidnap anyone, he would kidnap Mary. She looks quite as I did in my youth, and I'm sure a pirate would have wanted to kidnap me."
"Don't taunt me with lost opportunities, my dear. — Lauren Willig

When 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 Pogrebin

Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon
the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

The clouds were gathering over Mary, too--deep and dark, but of altogether another kind from those that enveloped Letty: no troubles are for one moment to be compared with those that come of the wrongness, even if it be not wickedness, that is our own. Some clouds rise from stagnant bogs and fens; others from the wide, clean, large ocean. But either kind, thank God, will serve the angels to come down by. In the old stories of celestial visitants the clouds do much; and it is oftenest of all down the misty slope of griefs and pains and fears, that the most powerful joy slides into the hearts of men and women and children. — George MacDonald

The all American work ethic, destructive enough by itself, also packs a gender double standard that strip-mines the natural resources of both parents. It has taught us that as their earnings and success increase, men become "more manly," while women become "less feminine." This perverse cultural dynamic gives fathers an incentive to stay away from their families and kill themselves at work, while coercing mothers to limit their career commitment, which in turn limits their wages and shortchanges their families. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I found I could listen without envy to Letty's singing, and afterwards when the applause came, I did not mind that Mrs Knowles was heaping praises upon her. Peter's hands were on my chair, and when I leaned back I could feel them against my shoulders. — Jennifer Paynter

It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

In 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

We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Letty had barely touched her food. Javier stared down at her through a pair of aviator sunglasses. "You forgot something," she said. "What's that?" "My name. Who will they be expecting?" "Selena Kitt. S-E-L-E-N-A K-I-T-T. But you won't be carrying any identification. — Blake Crouch

No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Whatever else the true preaching of the word would need to include, it at least would have to be a word that speaks from the perspective of those who have been crushed and marginalized in our society. It would need to be a word of solidarity, healing and love in situations of brokenness and despair and a disturbing and troubling word of justice to those who wish to protect their privilege by exclusion. — Letty M. Russell

Aunt Letty was a very tough old lady: aunts often were in those days. — C.S. Lewis

Over the years, I've found that I either live life or write about it. I can't seem to do both simultaneously - I have to do it sequentially. When I write incessantly, I lose touch with the issues and passions that fuel the work. But when I get too involved in organizations or movement endeavors, I almost forget that I'm a writer. It's a constant struggle to find a balance between these two worlds - the solitary writing life and the life of a social justice activist. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

A family stitched together with love seldom unravels. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

But Mary had not come into the world to be sad or to help another to be sad. Sorrowful we may often have to be, but to indulge in sorrow is either not to know or to deny God our Saviour. True, her heart ached for Letty; and the ache immediately laid itself as close to Letty's ache as it could lie; but that was only the advance-guard of her army of salvation, the light cavalry of sympathy: the next division was help; and behind that lay patience, and strength, and hope, and faith,and joy. This last, modern teachers, having failed to regard it as a virtue, may well decline to regard as a duty; but he is a poor Christian indeed in whom joy has not at least a growing share, and Mary was not a poor Christian--at least, for the time she had been learning, and as Christians go in the present aeon of their history. — George MacDonald

Friendships aren't perfect and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I really feel that a big part of my job - besides getting the money - is to see to it that Woody [Allen] has what he needs to make the film that he has envisioned. — Letty Aronson

She responded to Letty's well-meaning suggestions with the unblinking disdain perfected by cats in their dealings with their humans. — Lauren Willig

Letty, it's just a business. Don't get emotional about it."
She grinned. "You're a fine one to talk. You're the most emotional man I know."
"The hell I am," he muttered. "I have a lot more self-control than you do, Madam President."
"Let's not argue about that," Letty said — Jayne Ann Krentz

Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

People feel that drama is more important. Dramas always earn more honors than comedy. — Letty Aronson

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son's future are counting on me. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

The residence sat toward the back of the property, which sloped up across a masterfully landscaped yard shaded with maple and spruce trees, dotted with stone sculptures - fountains, birdbaths, angels - and not a leaf to be seen on the pockets of lush green grass. An engine turned over near the house. Letty stepped off the drive and crawled into a thicket of mountain laurel as a boxy Mercedes G-Class rolled past. Through the branches and tinted glass, she glimpsed Chase at the wheel, a young boy in a booster in the backseat. The car ride over had only intensified her nausea, and as the diesel engine faded away, she put her finger down her throat and retched in the leaves. She felt instantly better. Weaker. Less drunk. But better. — Blake Crouch

I've got one more record. - Have you heard "So Long, Letty"? I suppose you have.'
'Honestly, you don't understand - I haven't heard a thing.'
Nor known, nor smelt, nor tasted he might have added; only hot cheeked girls in hot secret rooms. The young maidens he had known at New Haven in 1914 kissed men saying 'There!' hands at the man's chest to push him away. Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Before devising any blueprint that includes the assumption of Having It All, we need to ask ... Why do we need Everything? — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Control is a big issue when you're sick. It's the first thing you lose - other losses come later. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual liberation, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Friends seem to be like aspirin; we don't really know why they make a sick person feel better, but they do. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

What I often say to people who are quick to say I'm not a feminist is if you think you're not a feminist, give it all back. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Woody's [Allen] very relaxed with the cast and likes them to do their thing and is not an over-director type. Somehow it works. — Letty Aronson

Letty allowed her to ramble on while she looked around the wood, remembering its autumn carpet of beech leaves and wondering if it could be the kind of place to lie down in and prepare for death when life became too much to be endured. — Barbara Pym

The Bible is used as a means of reinforcing their [women's] subordination to men through divine sanction. — Letty M. Russell

I find it profoundly symbolic that I am appearing before a committee of fifteen men who will report to a legislative body of one hundred men because of a decision handed down by a court comprised of nine men
on an issue that affects millions of women ... I have the feeling that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be struggling for this legislation. If men could get pregnant, maternity benefits would be as sacrosanct as the G.I. Bill. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Why 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 Pogrebin

People tend to be exquisitely precise when describing pain. We don't just say it hurts, we say it throbs or aches; it's a burning, wrenching, gnawing sensation; it's sharp or dull; it chafes; it stings. But where pain specifies, joy generalizes. It was great! we say. Terrific! Beautiful! Fantastic! — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin