Anna Quindlen Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Anna Quindlen
Anna Quindlen Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Anna Quindlen on Wise Famous Quotes.
Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
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.
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.
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.
I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.
Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She had the odd sense that she had been missing something, seeing the world flat when everything was rounded.
Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.
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.
If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.
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.
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.
The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.
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.