Anna Quindlen quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Anna Quindlen on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

Control is a nice concept, little more.

Reading has as many functions as the human body, and ... not all of them are cerebral.

Sometimes things have to come when you're ready for them.

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

There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around.

ha! They will get to that place soon enough.

He'd had a dog once, in that way he'd had everything in his childhood, ordinary but a lot less lasting.

It was easy to figure out how people ought to behave out in the world if you never went out in the world yourself.

It's a lot harder to save people than you think it is.

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.

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

First you have one sort of life and then you have another. I'm sorry, that must sound odd." "No it doesn't. That's what happens to everybody. You

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

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

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.

Nearly everyone I meet expresses deep sympathy about the fact that I have never married. Sometimes I wonder why.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Books became the greatest purveyors of truth, and the truth shall make you free.

I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.

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

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

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

A book
the book that was, for some reason, THE book
can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the difference.

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

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

To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do, said Victor Hugo.

I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

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

There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.

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.

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.

Speech is the voice of the heart.

The women I know who are happiest today are the ones who have close female friends. Maybe that's true of men, too, but essentially it's different.

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.

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

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

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.

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

At a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it's attributed to a whole raft of wits.

...I had enough of real life everyday to last me forever.

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

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

She had the odd sense that she had been missing something, seeing the world flat when everything was rounded.

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

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

The purse is the mirror of the soul.

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.

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

She wants to be someone else, somewhere else, and I can't blame her.

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

It was like death, except I had to go on living.

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

A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If

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

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

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

Maybe everyone stays the same inside, even when their life looks nothing like what they once had, or even imagined.

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

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.

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

Easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure.

Even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand's editor should have taken care of).

Funny, that no one had ever asked what had happened to the dishes, the scraps, the crumbs in the photographs, on the poster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.

It is so easy to exist instead of live.

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

She is a prisoner in the amber of her own past.

That's why I ask." "What

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

This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.

Here is what I know about dressing like your teenage daughter: She will always look better than you

There were a thousand ways to imagine someone unhappy and so few ways to imagine someone contented.

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.

For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast.

Anyone familiar with the love affairs between men and women could have told them that theirs would soon be over.

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

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.

My husband and I have together created three children, but we have separate finances, and that's the way I like it.

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

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.

We gave him to a family with a farm, Son, his father had said when he got home from school.

But no one ever leaves the town where they grew up, not really, even if they go.

Words, words. They mean nothing, less than nothing. I know.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming.

She had certainly learned about not having enough money, which is different from being poor.

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.