Anna Quindlen Quotes:

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2009). “Being Perfect”, p.15, Random House

Topics: Confidence, Letting Go, Being Yourself, Discovering Yourself, Amazing Woman

My sister is a public school teacher. She makes far far less money than I do, and gets almost no public attention for her work. Yet I believe what she does is infinitely more important and more difficult than what I do.

Topics: Teacher, Believe, School

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “How Reading Changed My Life”, p.70, Ballantine Books

Topics: Travel, Reading, Book, Journey Home, Inspirational Reading

New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.

Topics: New York, Cities, Identity

I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.155, Ballantine Books

Topics: Children, Shopping, Two, Grocery Shopping

Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.

Topics: Reading, People, World

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Topics: Children, Thinking, People, Independent Bookstores, Decorating

There's no greater happiness than doing something every day that you love, that you feel you do in a satisfactory fashion, and which both supports and gives you time to support your family. I felt so lucky to have all that.

Topics: Fashion, Giving, Support

I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

Topics: Marriage, Husband, Mean, Marriage Vows

I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.

Topics: Teenager, Feminist, World

I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

Topics: Life, Children, Editors, Good Judges

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

Topics: Inspirational, Brother, Sibling, Brothers And Sisters, Inspirational Brother And Sister

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

Topics: Inspirational, Design, Firsts

When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.

Topics: Want, Habit, Wells

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

Topics: Children, Gay, People, Cursing, Mock

[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.

Topics: Aftermath, Bigs, Enormous, Small Talk

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?

Topics: Talking, Addiction, Smoking, Conundrums

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

Topics: Fashion, Looks, Racist

But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

Topics: Respect, Kids, Important

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2003). “Object Lessons: One True Thing; Black and Blue”

Topics: Children, Regret, Past

Not writing at all leads to nothing.

Topics: Writing

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.

Topics: Inspirational, May, Half, Carefree

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Topics: Gun, Spoons, World, Metal Detectors, Forks And Spoons

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

Topics: America, May, Lasts, Uncomplicated, Victim Mentality

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

Topics: Children, Sitting, Keeping Quiet

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.

Topics: Trust, Stupid, Book, Ignorance Is Not Bliss

I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehersal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.

Topics: Life, Journey, Dresses

Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

Topics: Children, Games, Play, Board Games

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

Topics: Life, Opportunity, Starting Over

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

Topics: Done, Want, Enough

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

Topics: Wisdom, Strong, Men, Cement

When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

Topics: Jobs, Inspirational Life, College, Seekers

Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.

Topics: Real, House, Next, Manic

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

Topics: Girl, Wisdom, Boys, Conventional Wisdom

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

Topics: Ideas, Literature, Dough, Teachable, Teachable Moments

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?

Topics: Mother, Strong, Children, Raising Children, Shortcomings

The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.

Topics: Motherhood, Two, Apples, Mothering

Speech is the voice of the heart.

Topics: Heart, Voice, Speech

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.

Topics: Inspirational, Funny, Life, Solo Travel, Photography And Travel

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

Topics: Joy, World, Reader

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...

Topics: Book, Reading, Home, Book Love

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

Topics: Writing, Journey, Discovery

Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

Topics: Giving Up, Smart, People, Becoming Yourself, Trying To Be Perfect

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

Topics: Growing Up, Real, Reading, Being Lazy

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.

Topics: Voice, Doe, Done

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

Topics: Daughter, Mother, Human Experience

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

Topics: Dream, Book, Other Worlds

Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

Topics: Graduation, Two, Firsts

You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

Topics: Heart, Soul, Mind

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

Topics: Mother, Children, Home, Stunned, Freshman Year

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.20, Ballantine Books

Topics: Literature, Life Is, Middle, Endings Being New Beginnings, Beginnings And Endings

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

Topics: Morning, Smart, Women, Not Pretty, Not Pretty Enough

A finished person is a boring person.

Topics: Book, Reading, Boring, Boring Person

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

Topics: Literature, Want, Mail, Elude You, Elude Us

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

Topics: Life, Beach, Ocean, Cool Beach, Beach And Ocean

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

Topics: Travel, Book, Reading

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

Topics: Dream, Reading, Mind

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Topics: Xenophobia, Heart, Racism

I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it...why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer.

Topics: Everyday, Normal

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

Topics: Inspirational Life, Writing, Wrinkles, Bleak House, Wrinkle In Time

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

Topics: Health, Men, Usa, Public Health, American Woman

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2013). “Every Last One and Rise and Shine: Two Bestselling Novels”, p.229, Random House

Topics: Morning, Someone You Love, Worst

I don't know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it.

Topics: Mom, Knowing, Advice, Female Friends

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.

Topics: Jobs, Media, Diagnosis

Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

Topics: Stars, Spring, Moon, Azaleas, Cold Night

So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you always know that you pushed hard and aimed high. Take a leap of faith. Fear not. Courage is the ultimate career move.

Topics: Moving, Careers, Leap Of Faith

We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

Topics: America, Might, Conviction, Might Makes Right, Ambivalence

So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.

source: - "Anna Quindlen discusses 'A Short Guide To A Happy Life'". BookBrowse interview, www.bookbrowse.com.

Topics: Happiness, Granted

When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.

Topics: Men, House, Helping, House Cleaning

People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling.

Topics: Running, Heart, Wine

The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.

Topics: Spiritual, Writing, Technology

It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn't see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves.

Topics: Mistake, May, Path

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives

Topics: Spiritual, Reading, Emotional

Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

Topics: Fashion, Lasts, Comes And Goes

I only really understand myself, what I'm really thinking and feelings, when I've talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room.

Topics: Thinking, Circles, Feelings, Female Friends, Empty Rooms

Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Topics: Building, Enough, Decorating

Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, she will mention her girlfriends.

Topics: Girlfriend, Calendars, May, Babysitter

When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women?

Topics: Mother, Nursing, Clothes, Dichotomy

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

Topics: Summer, Distance, Lying, Hiatus, Stoops

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

Topics: Block, Writing, People, Writer's Block

Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.

Topics: Running, Teacher, Rap, Chewing, Deadly Sins

If God is watching us, as some believers suggest, as though we were a television show and God had a lot of free time, the deity would surely be bemused by how dumbed-down devotion has sometimes become in this so-called modern era. How might an omnipotent being with the long view of history respond to those who visit the traveling exhibit of a grilled-cheese sandwich , sold on eBay, that is said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary? It certainly argues against intelligent design , or at least intelligent design in humans .

Topics: Intelligent, Views, Ebay, Intelligent Design, Modern Era

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

Topics: Country, Political, Enemy, President Johnson, Third World Countries

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.

Topics: War, Character, Today, War On Poverty, Poverty Today

An election marks the end of the affair; it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job; others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur.

Topics: Jobs, Winning, Men, Pretty Words

being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.

Topics: Strong, Giving, Parent, Good Parent, Pay It Forward

Testosterone does not have to be toxic.

Topics: Men, Toxic, Doe

A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful marriage. You wouldn't believe how cheaply I can do a kitchen renovation.

Topics: Marriage, Lying, Believe, Renovation, White Lie

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.

Topics: Long, Pieces, Life Is, Cement, Small Pieces

the most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.

Topics: Justice, Judging, Majority

I don't understand how people learn to live in the world if they haven't had siblings. Everything I learned about negotiation, territoriality, coexistence, dislike, inbred differences and love despite knowledge I learned from my four younger siblings ...

Topics: Sibling, Differences, People, Inbreds, Younger Siblings

Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.

Topics: Sweet, Smart, People

The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you.

Topics: Sometimes, Life Is, Easy

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

Topics: Family, Writing, Thinking

There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.

Topics: New York, Party, Moving, New Books

Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.

Topics: Years, Twenties, Different

You're like a cake when you're young. You can't rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.

Topics: Fall, Cake, Rising

what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.

Topics: People, Use, Matter, Devalue

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.

Topics: Women, Thinking, Way

Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.

Topics: Individuality, Pearls, Sometimes, Ethnic Stereotypes, Sandy

We are awash in the revealed world.

Topics: World, Information

Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated ...

Topics: Beach, Pain, Recovery

I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.

Topics: Fitness, Thinking, Alternatives

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

Topics: Children, Thinking, Parent

Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.

Topics: Change, Thinking, Fire

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

Topics: Book, Home, Philadelphia

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

Topics: Fall, Humanity, Faces, Little League, Homophobia

There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.

Topics: Believe, Heart, Love Is

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

Topics: Believe, Giving, Abortion

[I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement.

Topics: Justice, Funeral, Balance, Announcements

Uncontrollable consumerism has become a watchword of our culture despite regular and compelling calls for its end. The United States has more malls than high schools; Americans spend more time shopping than reading. ... Some of the most insightful writing about the American character over the nation's history has been about neither freedom nor democracy but about the crazed impulse to acquire things.

Topics: Reading, Writing, School, American Character

the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.

Topics: Reading, Writing, Gripping, Humdrum

Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy.

Topics: Kids, Sick, Care

The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.

Topics: Leadership, Government, Differences

the separation of church and state grew out of a desire, not so much to protect government from religion, but to protect religion from government.

Topics: Government, Church, Desire

What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.

Topics: Friendship, Women, Heart, Female Friends, Thermometers

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.

Topics: Friendship, Real, Nice, Hard Truths

high fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later.

Topics: Fashion, Littles, Mark, High Fashion, Retailers

I went to a women's college. ... it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool; I didn't learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by that time I was one hell of a kicker.

Topics: Education, College, Swim, Kickers

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

Topics: Giving, Mortality

It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.

Topics: Writing, Crafts, Spirit

We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.

Topics: Motherhood, Female, Made

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.

Topics: Gentleman, Feminism, Busy, Castration

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

Topics: Father, Winning, Race, Postcards, Rat Race

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

Topics: Dream, Reading, Pride, Transcending

those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...

Topics: People, Bookstores, Way

I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.

Topics: Children, Men, Hands

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.

Topics: Romance, Special, Rooms, Emergency Room, Great Romance

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

Topics: Sleep, Men, Issues

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.

Topics: Tired, Thinking, America

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

Topics: Children, Men, Long, Hysterectomy, Childbearing

There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.

Topics: Letting Go, Perfection, Groups

I am an affirmative action hire.

Topics: Action, Affirmative Action, Affirmative

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

Topics: Life, Party, College, Happenstance

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

Topics: Crazy, Feelings, Use

It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.

Topics: Reality, Treasure, Delusion

There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance

Topics: Trying, Posture, Acknowledge

I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.

Topics: Cat, Responsibility, Pet

She say guilt is a useless emotion." "Oh, please," says Nancy. "Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

Topics: Animal, Guilt, Useless

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Topics: Reading, Sublime, Austen, Good Reading

Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

Topics: Children, Littles, Raising Children

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

Topics: New York, Cities, Progress

I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.

Topics: Mother, Life Lesson, Men

I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.

Topics: Writing, Sunday, Brain

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

Topics: Marriage, Two, People

Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.

Topics: Mother, Baby, Real, Gay Men

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

Topics: School, Kids, Talking, Attending, School Reunion

If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.

Topics: Catholic, Church, Hierarchy

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

Topics: Wedding, Men, Numbers, Wedding Pictures, Enamored

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

Topics: Ignorant, Speech, Reason

Acts of bravery don't always take place on battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.

Topics: Courage, Heart, Character, Acts Of Bravery

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2004). “Loud and Clear”, p.102, Random House

Topics: Silence, Democratic, Treason

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2012). “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life”, p.42, Random House

Topics: Age, Conformity, Realizing, Conventional Wisdom, Useful Things

The women of my mother's generation had, in the main, only one decision to make about their lives: who they would marry. From that, so much else followed: where they would live, in what sort of conditions, whether they would be happy or sad or, so often, a bit of both. There were roles and there were rules.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.17, Ballantine Books

Topics: Mother, Women, Decision

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

Topics: Waste, Easy, Hours, Limestone, Fifth Avenue

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “Every Last One: A Novel”, p.314, Random House

Topics: Simple, Scary, Sometimes

When you look at the women that have made a real difference in the world throughout history, what they’ve done has almost always been defined by fearlessness. That’s something I came to at a certain point; I wish I’d come to it younger. Stop looking over your shoulder — there’s nobody who matters back there.

source: - "Anna Quindlen On Tooting Your Own Horn, Fearlessness And Raising Feminist Sons". Interview with Nina Bahadur, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 17, 2014.

Topics: Real, Differences, Over You

Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.

source: - Source: www.goodreads.com

Topics: Grateful, Fighting, Parent

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2004). “Loud and Clear”, p.157, Random House

Topics: Grief, Silence, Funeral, Clamor

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2006). “Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City”, p.7, National Geographic Books

Topics: Children, Book, People

That's really what I want in a leader; I want somebody who's really, really smart.

Topics: Smart, Leader, Want

If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.

Topics: Real, Writing, Night, Folding, Strollers

The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.'

Topics: Basketball, Girl, Sports, American Writer

I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.

source: - Source: urbanmoms.ca

Topics: Stories, Love Story, Happy Endings

Your kids are launched. You love your work but you understand how to place it in the panorama of the rest of your life. There's this line in the book, and when I wrote it I thought yes, that's it - if you think of life as a job, maybe by the time you get to, say, in my case, 60, you've finally gotten good at it.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Jobs, Book, Love You, Love Your Work, Panorama

I think when people keep saying to you, "You're good at this," you just keep doing it.

Topics: Thinking, People

My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “Every Last One: A Novel”, p.315, Random House

Topics: Writing, Trying, Habit

You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Jobs, Moving, Decisions You Make, Changing Jobs, Confidant

When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.

Topics: Inspirational, Mother, New York

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.

Topics: Dog, Good Person, Good Dog

Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.

Topics: Memories, Children, Car, Adult Children, Spur Of The Moment

As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Father, Kids, College

I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. What I learned from it is that today seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly.

Topics: Journey, Years, Giving, Good In The World

Socialized medicine, some still cry, but it's long been socialized, with those covered paying for those who are underinsured. American medicine is simply socialized badly, penny wise and pound foolish.

Topics: Wise, Medicine, Long, Socialized Medicine

February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.

Topics: Dirty, Winter, Two

It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2012). “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life”, p.35, Random House

Topics: Men

This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.5, Ballantine Books

Topics: Dream, Children, Perfect

All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2003). “Object Lessons: One True Thing ; Black and Blue”

Topics: Trouble

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.

Topics: Doctors, Rights, Medicine, Medical Procedures, Medical Profession

In life, the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

Topics: Classroom, Exam, Ends

And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.

Topics: Thinking, Feels, Knows

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

Topics: Happiness, Baby, Passion, Terminal Illness

I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.

Topics: Thinking, President, Smarter

On social welfare the Church does so much good around the world - nuns running schools and homeless shelters, priests ministering to people who are in crisis.

Topics: Running, School, People, Social Welfare

It's what the Taliban does in Afghanistan, it's what gets done in the Middle East, and it's clearly something that certain mainly conservative groups in the United States would like to do. They miss the good old days, when men were men and women were nothing.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Men, Missing, Middle East, Good Old Days

I was a kid who sometimes got in trouble because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, which turned out to be an advantage when I became an opinion columnist.

Topics: Kids, Mouths, Opinion

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

source: - Source: www.writersdigest.com

Topics: Book, Writing, Thinking

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

Topics: Running, Children, Parent

I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Sunday, Boys, Decision

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.4, Ballantine Books

Topics: Writing, Thinking, People, Filthy

Americans like warm characters. It's why, no matter what he did in the early days, they kind of resonated to Bill Clinton because he seems like a guy that you could sit down and have a burger and a beer with. It's even why, despite the fact that he sometimes seemed to be not firing on all cylinders, lots of them still like George W. Bush - because he seemed like the kind of guy you could have a burger and a beer with.

Topics: Character, Beer, Guy, Cylinders

I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.

source: - Source: www.goodreads.com

Topics: Reading, Hands, Way, Reading Aloud

Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.

Topics: Daddy, Wow, Way

I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.

Topics: Novelists, Fiction, World

I really feel like if you can get past your fear, if you can say, "Uh-uh, I'm afraid to do that and I'm going to do it anyhow," that that's really the way to have a satisfying life moving forward. I think I had that kind of fearlessness even as a young person. It wasn't tempered by experience or wisdom, but it took me a long way.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Moving, Past, Thinking

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

Topics: Book, Writing, Thinking

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.

Topics: Opportunity, Doors, Years, Equal Opportunity

A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.

source: - Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.51, Ballantine Books

Topics: Children, Women, Hair, Tune Up

That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper.... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.

Topics: Sex, Dirty, Responsibility, Lack Of Responsibility, Assertiveness

But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.

Topics: Ignorance, Perception, Age, Information Age, Insensitive