Anna Quindlen Quotes

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

there is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolatio...

A loose end - that's what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, t...

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

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

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I w...

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someon...

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world...

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

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we w...

A finished person is a boring person.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fu...

It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit so...

H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a...

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the w...

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a samp...

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I'v...

My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room and I realized that out of a se...

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too bus...

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessl...

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their hig...

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of ...

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us o...

I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was ...

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

But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of o...

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at lea...

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictur...

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afra...

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

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to liv...

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. ...

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

those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some p...

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I w...

So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture ...

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that two people are incompatible that i...

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the ...

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined ...

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convin...

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And ...

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been mad...

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

I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read tra...

I had that feeling you have when you're watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feel...

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and th...

I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to...

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that di...

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

The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the m...

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that re...

For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it woul...

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn yo...

I don't even have a dog. I tell people I'm allergic so they won't think less of me. Instead I have a...

In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not...

It's amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn't come true become,after a while...

Speech is the voice of the heart.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has a...

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consist...

The ultimate act of bravery does not take place on a battlefield. It takes place in your heart, when...

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. B...

I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's...

I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at...

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; th...

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

Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.

The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering ...

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

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fu...

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human deve...

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not ...

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in yo...