Anna Quindlen Quotes & Sayings

Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held. — Anna Quindlen

You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul. — Anna Quindlen

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description. — Anna Quindlen

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have. — Anna Quindlen

In the aftermath of death Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous. — Anna Quindlen

Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American. — Anna Quindlen

Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That's what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first. — Anna Quindlen

Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychological one. — Anna Quindlen

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

I had that feeling you have when you're watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn't exactly real, that it will be gone by the time you get home and make a cup of tea. I found a lot of life like that when I was younger, as though I was practicing for what came later. — Anna Quindlen

Knew, that for a birthday or a holiday or simply a dinner party offering, they could bring her a snow globe. Except that Dorothea was no longer charmed by snow — Anna Quindlen

Words, words. They mean nothing, less than nothing. I know. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens's latest novel and who kept battered copies of Catcher in the Rye in our back pockets and backpacks. We are the ones who saw to it that Pride and Prejudice never went out of print. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. — Anna Quindlen

An election marks the end of the affair; it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job; others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur. — Anna Quindlen

...there is a piece of me missing so big that the pain doubles me over, clawing at my gut... — Anna Quindlen

With reference to the younger generation ... "If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane." — Anna Quindlen

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

It's an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you're a five-year-old, you don't pay any attention to what anyone thinks of you. You just sort of are in your skin. — Anna Quindlen

It is the only time I can rest without sleeping, think without deciding, speak and hear my own voice. It is the only time I can be alone. Slightly less than an hour each weekday when no one makes demands. — Anna Quindlen

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

I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am. — Anna Quindlen

And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful. — Anna Quindlen

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

One of the things that got me on this topic for this book was that when I was researching the column I wrote in 2009 saying that I was stepping down from my column at "Newsweek" because I wanted to make room for newer, fresh voices out there, I discovered that in the year I was born, 1952, the average life expectancy of an American was 68. I was shocked by that figure and every time I mention it I hear a gasp from somebody in the crowd. Now, of course, we're more or less at 80, so that means that we've gotten 12 additional years. — Anna Quindlen

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that. — Anna Quindlen

The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

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

Testosterone does not have to be toxic. — Anna Quindlen

I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

The dining room table in the home of a person living alone becomes the entire world, divided into countries: the area for the mail, for work if there is any, a small duchy set aside for the placement of one dish, one bowl, one fork. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

Now the baby boomers, i.e., us, are getting older, and were suddenly discovering that there are great things about getting older. You have time for your friendships and you appreciate them in ways that you didn't before. — Anna Quindlen

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

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us. — Anna Quindlen

I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific. — Anna Quindlen

Now, a lot of people are challenged by the fact that a record number of people in their sixties have living parents, and a record number of people in their sixties have kids who may still depend upon them. — Anna Quindlen

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the colour of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking. — Anna Quindlen

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. — Anna Quindlen

When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts ... But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all. — Anna Quindlen

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. — Anna Quindlen

February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long. — Anna Quindlen

The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women. — Anna Quindlen

Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be. I don't want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be contrarian, to go another way. George Eliot wrote, 'It is never too late to be what you might have been.' It is never too early, either. — Anna Quindlen

I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia. — Anna Quindlen

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

Socialized medicine, some still cry, but it's long been socialized, with those covered paying for those who are underinsured. American medicine is simply socialized badly, penny wise and pound foolish. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins. — Anna Quindlen

[I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement. — Anna Quindlen

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? — Anna Quindlen

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

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort ... reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung ... — Anna Quindlen

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat. — Anna Quindlen

Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'. — Anna Quindlen

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them.

And I asked him why. Why didn't he go to one of the shelters? Why didn't he check himself into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, "Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view. — Anna Quindlen

Just remember that sometimes you drift into things, and then you can't get out of them. Not to decide is to decide. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

One of the most important parts of tending our friendships is working our way, over time, into the kind of friendships that can support cataclysm, friendships that are able to move from the office or the playground to hospital rooms and funerals. Some of my married friends are widows now, and some are single, and some have lost parents and had kids who were lost to them for awhile. And even those of us who so far have been relatively unscathed know how important the bonds of love are, how they make a net so we don't hit the ground when we fall from the wire. — Anna Quindlen

Peter was easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure. But Rebecca forgave him nothing. She told herself that this was not because he — Anna Quindlen

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

It's so easy to be wrong about the things you're close to. I know that now. I learned that then. — Anna Quindlen

I'm not making light of prayers here, but of so-called school prayer, which bears as much resemblance to real spiritual experienceas that freeze-dried astronaut food bears to a nice standing rib roast. From what I remember of praying in school, it was almost an insult to God, a rote exercise in moving your mouth while daydreaming or checking out the cutest boy in the seventh grade that was a far, far cry from soul-searching. — Anna Quindlen

To a surprising conclusion about this moment in our lives. No, it's not that there are weird freckly spots on the back of our hands, although there are, or that construction guys don't make smutty comments as we pass, although they don't. It's that we've done a pretty good job of becoming ourselves, and that this is, in so many ways, the time of our lives. As Carly Simon once sang, "These are the good old days." Lots of candles, plenty of cake. I wouldn't be twenty-five again on a bet, or even forty. — Anna Quindlen

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

I only really understand myself, what I'm really thinking and feelings, when I've talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room. — Anna Quindlen

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

How many times in the past three months have I been reminded of Ruby's two selves, the careful courteous young woman who spoke so sweetly to strangers and the person she let loose at home, where she was safe, where she could be spiky and harsh and uncertain and at sea? I have two selves now, too, the one that goes out in the world and says what sound like the right things and nods and listens and sometimes even smiles, and the real woman, who watches her in wonder, who is nothing but a wound, a wound that will not stop throbbing except when it is anesthetized. I know what the world wants: It wants me to heal. But to heal I would have to forget, and if I forget my family truly dies. — Anna Quindlen

The older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us - and love us despite what they know about us - are the joists that hold up the house of our existence. — Anna Quindlen

People froze you in place, Rebecca sometimes thought, trudging through the woods. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it. — Anna Quindlen

The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u. — Anna Quindlen

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

I'm just remembering myself at 22 or 23. I was all engine and no steering. (Laughter) I had the wheels but I had no steering. I do think it's true that when you're younger, you're more likely to listen to all the naysayers, and people are always telling you how you ought to behave and what kind of job you should get and how you should look. — Anna Quindlen

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

It was a kind of circular thing: to be the kind of person who would have taken Faith in, he had to be the kind of person who would take her back. — Anna Quindlen

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] — Anna Quindlen

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives.
[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010] — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen