Anna Quindlen Quotes

We are awash in the revealed world.

Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

high fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later.

The purse is the mirror of the soul.

There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance

Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.

Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a "teachable moment.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.

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.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

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.

When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.

Look at the view and you'll never be disappointed.

Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.

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.

It is so easy to exist instead of live.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.

You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some drunk comes around a corner and runs a stop sign.

I do tend to be almost kind of Pollyanna-ish person.

I'm very optimistic. I think if you would describe me, my pretty consistent affect is that I'm a pretty happy person.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

Obama doesn't seem like a burger and a beer kind of guy. I have to say, I don't find that problematic at all.

My mother was an incredibly loving mother.

I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and one of the things I like to say is that one of the biggest impediments I had to becoming a successful writer is I had a very happy childhood.

I know a lot and have written a lot and have thought a lot about motherhood.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

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.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.

I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.

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.

I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now.

You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.

I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star; are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?

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

Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn't read, I don't know what I'd do. But as a writer, it's both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along.

Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.

While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.