Top 100 Anna Quindlen Quotes

#1. A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #1219
#2. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #1537
#3. Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #8968
#4. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #9439
#5. For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #12898
#6. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #13580
#7. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #14285
#8. That's why I ask." "What

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #14957
#9. I do think that people who are now in their sixties and their seventies are living a different kind of life than their grandparents led, even in these tough times. A lot of them are more active, a lot of them are still working, which was not the case when our grandparents were in their sixties.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #18034
#10. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #24978
#11. Knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #27565
#12. Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #34815
#13. I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #40470
#14. Occasionally Rebecca wished her son would not be so very kind to her, as though she was the losing pitcher on a Little League team.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #47024
#15. Begin the work of becoming yourself.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #54848
#16. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #93818
#17. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #98401
#18. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #98737
#19. Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe only adults were stupid enough to think they knew exactly who they were.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #106312
#20. The most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #106939
#21. It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #107947
#22. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #114220
#23. I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #117879
#24. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #120631
#25. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #122528
#26. Predictions that unit cohesion could not survive honesty about sexual orientation were simply wrong. What does threaten morale arethe prolonged investigations, the questioning of friends and co-workers, the searches of barracks for magazines and letters, the witch hunts.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #134643
#27. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #136811
#28. You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #145020
#29. I'm fine, she said. But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what it must be like to know that you were going to die, that the trees would bud, flower, leaf, dry, die, and you would not be there to see any of it.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #149727
#30. There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #149855
#31. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #151551
#32. We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #155910
#33. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #161097
#34. The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #161830
#35. We're part of a mixed marriage: he's male, I'm female.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #164502
#36. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #167739
#37. Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #169952
#38. The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #174873
#39. The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #177081
#40. My friendships have a certain symmetry at the moment: Alice is always asking me what she should do, and Nancy is always telling me what I should do.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #177359
#41. The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #181314
#42. America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #191279
#43. All things being equal, I would choose a woman over a man in order to even the balance of power, to insinuate a different perspective into the process, to give young women something to shoot for and someone to look up to. But all things are rarely equal.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #193653
#44. Even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand's editor should have taken care of).

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #196708
#45. Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #210330
#46. Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #211906
#47. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #212876
#48. She was my one true thing.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #216412
#49. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #221341
#50. I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #228329
#51. Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #242867
#52. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #248644
#53. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #250014
#54. God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #251510
#55. People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #252781
#56. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #255366
#57. I know from experience that those least capable of truly assessing any marriage are the children who come out of it. We style them as we need them, to excuse our faults, to insulate ourselves from our own expendability or indispensability.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #255680
#58. Words, words. They mean nothing, less than nothing. I know.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #262563
#59. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #271945
#60. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #273924
#61. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #294562
#62. I am an affirmative action hire.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #298376
#63. Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #300129
#64. My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room, and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person, born on the hottest day of the year, conceived on a Christmas Eve, made by his father and me miraculously from scratch.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #302251
#65. Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #304335
#66. It's a lot harder to save people than you think it is.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #305921
#67. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #317226
#68. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #319724
#69. ...I had enough of real life everyday to last me forever.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #323875
#70. She had violated one of the basic tenets of any competent cook: she had purchased a turkey without comparing its size to the size of her oven.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #331853
#71. But no one ever leaves the town where they grew up, not really, even if they go.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #333132
#72. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #340341
#73. Sometimes things have to come when you're ready for them.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #340910
#74. 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. During

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #343102
#75. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #360655
#76. Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #371683
#77. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #374161
#78. Control is a nice concept, little more.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #375642
#79. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #376746
#80. One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word "elderly" in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #377659
#81. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #377729
#82. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #378695
#83. Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #397944
#84. My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #399816
#85. You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it's attributed to a whole raft of wits.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #409161
#86. Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #417338
#87. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #429324
#88. I know that it's very dispiriting for people in their twenties, who expected to graduate from college, get their own apartments, get a job, and move forward with their lives, and in fact are still now living with Mom and Dad, which is challenging for all involved.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #429483
#89. When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #432778
#90. I sort of feel like it comes around again. That when you get to a certain age, when you've lived enough and you've got your friends to support you and your family to support you, you wake up one morning and think, yeah, I'm okay.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #437357
#91. I hid my wounds because I was ashamed...but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced..

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #442110
#92. 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

Anna Quindlen Quotes #451406
#93. For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, "The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does."

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #460878
#94. You can get rid of the column. It's a little like staying at a hotel; you get used to the shape of the room, and then you're gone. With a novel you move into town and stay for a long time. That's both comforting and terrifying.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #464708
#95. I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #466264
#96. A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #467309
#97. Here is what I know about dressing like your teenage daughter: She will always look better than you

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #470996
#98. 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.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #471695
#99. Speech is the voice of the heart.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #473675
#100. Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.

Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes #477580

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