Kate Christensen Quotes

I lived a very, very Middle Eastern life until I was in my early 20s. It was very sheltered.

My life was very Japanese.

I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.

Just because I grew up a white guy in America doesn't mean that's the music of my life.

I never knew my father. He was never married to my mother; he was never a part of my life. It was just my mom, my brother and me.

My parents didn't make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate - he didn't have a career as such; he was a printing salesman essentially for most of his working life.

Dad worked his entire career as an aviation technician. Mom was a legal secretary who became a teacher. We lived a simple American life.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

My dad is a Deadhead, my mom's a Jewish-American princess from Jersey.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

I was born and raised in Essex, just outside London, to a financially comfortable, well-educated Pakistani family.

My mother's studies stopped with the third year of primary school, my father with the first. They taught me a deep sense of duty. But nobody was involved in politics in my family.

When you are born into a family like mine, you don't really know anything else. But you quickly realise that it's more about other people and how they are dealing with it. Some can be hugely in awe or uncomfortable, but to you, your parents are just your parents.

I grew up in a conservative household. That was the life of the time in Egypt: a conservative, middle-class household.

I didn't know my Dad - he moved out early. And my mom's politics were kind of hardscrabble. She didn't think about Democrats or Republicans. She thought about who made sense. I've been both in my life.

We both came from families in which parents got married, had children and the whole thing. So we were not the kind of people to live together permanently.

I feel like my life experience is that of an outsider. Let me explain: my parents are from Panama, and they moved to the United States the year after I was born. They moved into an all-white neighborhood, where the previous black family had a cross burned on their lawn.

My parents had an experience of life that is as opposite to mine as you can imagine.

I myself have already spent a third of my life in Germany, first in Cologne and then, since 1994, in Berlin.

I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

It used to be that a son could look at the father, and pretty much know what life was gonna be like as an adult. There was confidence in that, and comfort in that, and frustration also.

I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children - I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife.

I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.

I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.

We need to go back to the way it was 30 years ago, when everybody had Grandma and Grandpa, and we were willing to pass moral judgments about right and wrong.