Quote

The history of American women is all about leaving home - crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own.

Gail Collins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gail Collins
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: November 25
Journalist
Cincinnati
Ohio
Jobs
Oceans
Women
Continents
Home
Leaving
Ocean
Getting
American
Living
Crossing
History
Crossings

More quotes by Gail Collins

Image
One very clear memory I have of college is that I never learned anything in the big lectures. I have a feeling I'd have done even worse if they'd been on a laptop screen.
Gail Collins
Image
DePaulo says that 'singlism' -- a term she coined and for which we are prepared to forgive her -- is not just aimed at unmarried women.
Gail Collins
Image
If immigration reform passes, it'll be a big victory for sanity - nobody really believes it's healthy for a country to have millions and millions of undocumented noncitizens living in the shadows. But it'll also be a sign that the Republican Party has gotten tired of letting the Tea Party push it around.
Gail Collins
Image
When the simple word processors came in, writing became crisper, less dense - just because of the way we could instantly edit on the screen. Now the ability to mash up words and pictures and links and songs and tweets is what matters. I can't imagine what writing will be like in 2154.
Gail Collins
Image
You know, I really miss sex scandals. They're generally colorful. They almost never mean anything over the long run. And while they're going on, the people who actually keep the government running are let alone to go about their business. Good old sex scandals.
Gail Collins
Image
It is more a mentality than the actual places people live, as Jefferson and Hamilton would argue about - city versus country. For example, someone could have an empty place mentality yet be living in a condo in Boca Raton.
Gail Collins
Image
Non-crazy gun advocates - the ones who aren't stockpiling in preparation for a zombie invasion - don't like the idea of expanding background checks because they think it'll be a lot more paperwork. And it probably would make it more difficult to sell guns at, say, a flea market.
Gail Collins
Image
Back in the '70s when my friends in California were at Berkeley, in-state tuition was around $700 a year.
Gail Collins
Image
Well, it'd certainly be fascinating if we discovered that gays were better at being married than heterosexuals are. Talk about irony.
Gail Collins
Image
One line I'd draw would be on raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare. It sounds fair, since people are living longer. But it isn't. Lower income workers are the ones who find it hardest to keep working after 65. And they'll get penalized with lower benefits.
Gail Collins
Image
The Tea Party people say they're angry about socialism, but maybe they're really angry about capitalism. If there's a sense of being looked down upon, it's that sense of failure that's built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers.
Gail Collins
Image
Elections have to have at least a little meaning. Obama ran on income tax hikes for the wealthy. People knew they were voting for that. They want that. And it's good policy.
Gail Collins
Image
Take Hispanic voters. They favor Democrats because they like the party's programs, from health care reform to government spending on education. It's not because the Republicans don't have a big enough Office of Hispanic Outreach.
Gail Collins
Image
Once you're done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner.
Gail Collins
Image
If Christmas is for families, what do you do when there are families scattered all over the country? I am pretty sure God wants to make sure I touch all the bases, even if I spend his actual birthday with Delta Airlines.
Gail Collins
Image
I have always believed the iron rule of politics was that women don't vote for men who yell.
Gail Collins
Image
Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.
Gail Collins
Image
I grew up in one of the most socially conservative neighborhoods in Ohio, and my parents were traditional Catholics. But in her old age, my mother got her home health care from a guy who was gay, who was wonderful to her. Before she died, she rode a float in the Cincinnati Gay Pride Parade.
Gail Collins
Image
When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.
Gail Collins
Image
Whenever you bring up women's internal workings, guys want to change the subject. Unless, of course, they're trying to change the laws.
Gail Collins