Anna Quindlen Quotes

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

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.

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

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.

Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.

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

Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.

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.

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

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.

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

My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

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.

I feel about exercise the same way that I feel about a few other things: that there is nothing wrong with it if it is done in private by consenting adults.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I'm a Catholic of the New Testament, I'm not a Catholic of the hierarchy.

If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.

Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.

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

People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.

Not writing at all leads to nothing.

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.

Today is the only guarantee you get.

I was very driven, very focused, very ambitious. I mean, when I look back on myself in my 20s, part of me just cringes.

We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

It is so easy to exist instead of live.