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.

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.

A finished person is a boring person.

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.

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Speech is the voice of the heart.

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

Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I am an affirmative action hire.

If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Familiarity breeds content.

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.

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.

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

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.

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?

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

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