Top 100 Anna Quindlen Quotes
#1. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.
Anna Quindlen
#3. If I waited long enough and said, "Okay, so what you're saying is you liked your life a lot better when you were 30?" everybody would get real quiet and then admit that that wasn't the case, that they really felt like they were sort of growing into themselves in a way.
Anna Quindlen
#6. She felt the way she always did when she was traveling, as though she was enjoying the novelty but would be happiest when she could consider it all from the vantage point of home, with her suitcase unpacked ...
Anna Quindlen
#7. Our ability to understand, to embrace, to help, to know, to feel and to love is bounded only by our own emotional ambitions. The capacity to open ourselves up to one another is as huge as we dare to make it.
Anna Quindlen
#8. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#9. By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.
Anna Quindlen
#10. If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
Anna Quindlen
#11. The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.
Anna Quindlen
#12. 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 ...
Anna Quindlen
#13. Funny, that no one had ever asked what had happened to the dishes, the scraps, the crumbs in the photographs, on the poster.
Anna Quindlen
#14. Sunny likes me, Mama, she had said that night at dinner after he'd been sent from the table for making his napkin into a hand puppet and refusing to make the hand puppet be quiet.
Anna Quindlen
#15. Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
Anna Quindlen
#16. For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.
Anna Quindlen
#17. Sometimes things have to come when you're ready for them.
Anna Quindlen
#18. There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Anna Quindlen
#19. We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.
Anna Quindlen
#21. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That's what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first.
Anna Quindlen
#22. Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.
Anna Quindlen
#23. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#24. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#25. Here is what I know about dressing like your teenage daughter: She will always look better than you
Anna Quindlen
#26. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#27. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
#28. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#29. It makes me angry to think that ... female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.
Anna Quindlen
#30. Then when she really thought about it she realized she'd been becoming different people for as long as she could remember but had never really noticed, or had put it down to moods, or marriage, or motherhood. The problem was that she'd thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product.
Anna Quindlen
#31. When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.
Anna Quindlen
#33. Your hair isn't quite right and maybe you're a size bigger than you should be and on and on and on. I think there comes a moment when you've matured to the point where you suddenly think, nonsense. I am fine just the way I am.
Anna Quindlen
#34. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#35. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#36. Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychological one.
Anna Quindlen
#37. There was a period when I believed stuff meant something. I thought that if you had matching side chairs and a sofa that harmonized and some beautiful lamps to light them you would have a home, that elegance signaled happiness.
Anna Quindlen
#38. A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
Anna Quindlen
#39. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#40. After all those years of people counting off seconds in her earpiece, I swear she has time wired into every bit of her body, so that it was almost exactly an hour when she climbed out.
Anna Quindlen
#41. You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.
Anna Quindlen
#42. This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.
Anna Quindlen
#43. If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be inexpensive, too.
Anna Quindlen
#44. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#45. In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
Anna Quindlen
#46. I think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.
Anna Quindlen
#47. Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.
Anna Quindlen
#48. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#49. Knew, that for a birthday or a holiday or simply a dinner party offering, they could bring her a snow globe. Except that Dorothea was no longer charmed by snow
Anna Quindlen
#50. Her face looks like a room with no drapes or shades.
Anna Quindlen
#51. Reading has as many functions as the human body, and ... not all of them are cerebral.
Anna Quindlen
#52. So you're getting squeezed at both sides. You're taking care of your mom and dad and you're still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there's a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled.
Anna Quindlen
#53. If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.
Anna Quindlen
#54. For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver
that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.
Anna Quindlen
#55. Now the baby boomers, i.e., us, are getting older, and were suddenly discovering that there are great things about getting older. You have time for your friendships and you appreciate them in ways that you didn't before.
Anna Quindlen
#56. If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
Anna Quindlen
#57. Perhaps only when we've made our peace with our own selves can we really be the kind of friends who listen, advise, but don't judge, or not too harshly.
Anna Quindlen
#58. It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows
and never forgets
that they are yours.
Anna Quindlen
#59. I think a lot of people, but particularly a lot of women, get to this stage when I'd say they're over 50. We face a lot of hard judgment from the world, we women. If you're a full-time mother, you should be out working. If you're out working, your kids must be being overlooked.
Anna Quindlen
#60. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#61. 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?
Anna Quindlen
#62. Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry. Control is an illusion; best intentions are the best we can do.
Anna Quindlen
#63. Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.
Anna Quindlen
#64. Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.
Anna Quindlen
#65. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.
Anna Quindlen
#66. I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.
Anna Quindlen
#67. When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.
Anna Quindlen
#68. London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
#69. Anyone familiar with the love affairs between men and women could have told them that theirs would soon be over.
Anna Quindlen
#70. When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother...When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone.
Anna Quindlen
#71. I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.
Anna Quindlen
#72. I don't even have a dog. I tell people I'm allergic so they won't think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of responsibility required.
Anna Quindlen
#73. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#74. The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.
Anna Quindlen
#75. The two dresses she'd brought with her in case of - well, just in case - stood in the corner of her closet like guests who have come to the wrong party and are backing out the door.
Anna Quindlen
#76. A book
the book that was, for some reason, THE book
can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the difference.
Anna Quindlen
#77. It's amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn't come true become,after a while, simply the way things are.
Anna Quindlen
#78. The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.
Anna Quindlen
#79. I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.
Anna Quindlen
#80. There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
Anna Quindlen
#81. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#82. Now, a lot of people are challenged by the fact that a record number of people in their sixties have living parents, and a record number of people in their sixties have kids who may still depend upon them.
Anna Quindlen
#83. Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What's tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil.
Anna Quindlen
#84. My doctor says that, contrary to conventional wisdom, she doesn't believe our memories flag because of a drop in estrogen but because of how crowded it in the drawers of our minds.
Anna Quindlen
#85. 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.
[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]
Anna Quindlen
#86. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.
Anna Quindlen
#87. Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the next round of pontificating and so saved their strength by staying silent.
Anna Quindlen
#88. With reference to the younger generation ... "If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Anna Quindlen
#89. And then sometimes we become one of those people and are amazed, not by our own strength but by that indomitable ability to slog through adversity, which looks like strength from the outside and just feels like every day when it's happening to you.
Anna Quindlen
#90. London opens to you like a novel itself. [ ... ] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
Anna Quindlen
#91. 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.
Anna Quindlen
#92. Peter was easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure. But Rebecca forgave him nothing. She told herself that this was not because he
Anna Quindlen
#93. This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.
Anna Quindlen
#94. Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.
Anna Quindlen
#95. An the president bring out the voters who were so enthusiastic about him in 2008 and seem a little disenchanted now? Can he bring out young people? Can he bring out Latinos? Can he bring out those white suburban moms?
Anna Quindlen
#96. The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.
Anna Quindlen
#98. A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.
Anna Quindlen
#99. It would take a hell of a man to replace no man at all.
Anna Quindlen
#100. You know what the opposite of 'rise and shine' is Bridge? 'Good night, and good luck.
Anna Quindlen
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