A biography for Alissa Quarthasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“There are things that neuroscience is useful for in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.”
“Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.”
“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.”
“Actors and writers and adjuncts are always looking for their next job: they find common cause with the female Uber drivers on contracts who have also been unprotected victims of sexual harassment.”
“I'm not one of these anti-TV people.”
“My father made me who I am; he was incredibly intellectually generous.”
“If we don't at least try to make the future more equitable, most of us will left with simply scraps.”
“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.”
“Teaching has always been a poorly paid profession, particularly considering its educational requirements and responsibilities.”
“I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school, and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it.”
“Kids don't come cheap.”
“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.”
“I love the show 'Billions.' But the main character is basically a hedge fund scumbag, and he's the hero.”
“In my 20s, I was a freelance writer with little money and living in a rabbit warren one-and-a-half-bedroom with a roommate.”
“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.”
“I saw my gender - and myself - as something of a construct. Like anyone who read one too many women studies' books in the 1990s, I aspired to both 'do' and undo my sex.”
“'Mr. Robot,' in particular, signals the rise of a fresh post-Occupy portrayal of the wealth gap. No longer is the story of income inequity delivered via a well-meaning, crushingly earnest indie film by John Sayles or in a single laugh line on 'Roseanne.'”
“I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.”