Anna Quindlen Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

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.

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.

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.

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

When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.

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

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

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.

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

Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.

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.

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

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

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.

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.

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.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

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

I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.

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.

Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Testosterone does not have to be toxic.

The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.

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

All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.

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

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.

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.

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.