Quindlen Quotes & Sayings

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. — Anna Quindlen

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage. — Anna Quindlen

It's hard to imagine yourself in the future. It's why people do so many dumb things, because they're mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we've made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed. — Anna Quindlen

The purse is the mirror of the soul. — Anna Quindlen

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

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness. — Anna Quindlen

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

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying. — Anna Quindlen

He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts. — Anna Quindlen

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

The rebels are firing all around us, yet for a moment it's so quiet you can hear your own breathing. Not a person but me in the world could deconstruct that sentence. If Meghan could hear her own breathing, it meant she was breathing fast. And since Meghan had a resting heart rate somewhere between coma and sleep because of all that swimming, if she was breathing fast, it meant she was afraid, which meant there was truly something to fear. — Anna Quindlen

So I do think sometimes the political mechanism is completely disconnected from the people. However, what I will say is that history tells us that whenever things start to move too fast, whenever progress makes people feel a little breathless, one of the go-to spots that government, that the ruling powers that society goes to is to try to repress women. — Anna Quindlen

Her face looks like a room with no drapes or shades. — Anna Quindlen

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too. — Anna Quindlen

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

Not writing at all leads to nothing. — Anna Quindlen

Hannah stomps, buries, suffocates, wishes for death. "Yeah," she says. "I'm good. — Kelly Quindlen

I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. What I learned from it is that today seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly. — Anna Quindlen

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books. — Anna Quindlen

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

After my mother died, I had a feeling that was not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life. — Anna Quindlen

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. — 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

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. — 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

I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display. — Anna Quindlen

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

Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What's tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil. — Anna Quindlen

The ultimate act of bravery does not take place on a battlefield. It takes place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

She say guilt is a useless emotion."
"Oh, please," says Nancy. "Guilt is what separates humans from animals. — Anna Quindlen

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind. — Anna Quindlen

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools. — Anna Quindlen

Speech is the voice of the heart. — Anna Quindlen

It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth. — 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

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

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

One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word "elderly" in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print. — Anna Quindlen

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

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed. — 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

Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life. — Anna Quindlen

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 — Anna Quindlen

The problem ... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not. — Anna Quindlen

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. — Anna Quindlen

She is not what I envied in high school, the popular girl. She is something I'm not even sure existed then, the sure-footed girl. She gives the impression of being completely herself, and only a part of that impression is false. — 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

I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed ... and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

I sort of feel like it comes around again. That when you get to a certain age, when you've lived enough and you've got your friends to support you and your family to support you, you wake up one morning and think, yeah, I'm okay. — Anna Quindlen

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

The rituals surrounding vacations among Manhattan's wealthiest and best-connected citizens are strange and specific. By vacations I don't mean country houses, which are part of the regular ebb and flow of life and which are frequently subjects for complaint - The kids never want to go! The caretaker missed the roof leak! The pipes froze! - as though having a six-thousand-square-foot, cedar-shingled cottage on five acres overlooking the ocean is nothing more or less than a constant test of character. — Anna Quindlen

I learned that if I ever claim sexual harassment, I will be confronted with every bozo I once dated, every women I once impressedas snotty and superior, and together they will provide a convenient excuse to disbelieve me. — Anna Quindlen

I'm always keeping an eye on the court. Also, when the members of Congress came to his office during the budget debacle of a year and a half back and said, "We want to de-fund Planned Parenthood," he said, "Not going to happen." Those apparently were more or less his exact words. — 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

It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women's rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement. — Anna Quindlen

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number. — Anna Quindlen

I've finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come. — Anna Quindlen

I Remember how we put in a security system to keep intruders out of the house, and how we only used it when we went on vacations. It didn't matter: OUr intruder had a place at our table, kew where we hid the Easter eggs and where we'd buried the pet guinea pigs, was so familiar that when I saw him in the bedroom doorway that last time I thought he was my own son, come to kill me. — Anna Quindlen

I've always thought that Freud's theory of penis envy was fairly ridiculous
but I'm absolutely certain that if you put a piece of bread in your mouth and suck on it you'll go to heaven. — Anna Quindlen

Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry. Control is an illusion; best intentions are the best we can do. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

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

I feel about exercise the same way that I feel about a few other things: that there is nothing wrong with it if it is done in private by consenting adults. — 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

Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on. — Anna Quindlen

The best thing about Sassy Seats is that grandmothers cannot figure out how they work and are in constant fear of the child's falling. This often makes them forget to comment on other aspects of the child's development, like why he is not yet talking or is still wearing diapers. Some grandmothers will spend an entire meal peering beneath the table and saying, "Is that thing steady?" rather than, "Have you had a doctor look at that left hand? — Anna Quindlen

It had turned out that climbing a tree was more difficult than it looked. It was harder than warrior pose in yoga, than teaser in Pilates, than the elliptical or the Reformer. Rebecca thought that if no one had thought of it yet, soon enough someone in the city would spearhead a craze for tree climbing in Central and Prospect Parks, and it would become the talk of every cocktail party: have you tried that large oak by the Sheep Meadow? Oh, it's completely changed my body. — Anna Quindlen

When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well. — Anna Quindlen

We are awash in the revealed world. — Anna Quindlen

If I waited long enough and said, "Okay, so what you're saying is you liked your life a lot better when you were 30?" everybody would get real quiet and then admit that that wasn't the case, that they really felt like they were sort of growing into themselves in a way. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

Falling apart is curling up into a fetal position and staying in bed for a week. What you were doing is having the emotional response an individual has to the loss of someone they love. We cry to give voice to our pain. — Anna Quindlen

I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like. — 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

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy. — Anna Quindlen

For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver
that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it. — Anna Quindlen

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time. — Anna Quindlen

And then sometimes we become one of those people and are amazed, not by our own strength but by that indomitable ability to slog through adversity, which looks like strength from the outside and just feels like every day when it's happening to you. — Anna Quindlen

More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down
not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault. — Anna Quindlen

She had violated one of the basic tenets of any competent cook: she had purchased a turkey without comparing its size to the size of her oven. — Anna Quindlen

Obviously I was mistaken. — Anna Quindlen

It sounded so promising. As if this would be the day. The day to ride a bike without training wheels. To make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding. To persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly. — Anna Quindlen

Karma is a boomerang and a bitch. — Anna Quindlen

I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me. — Anna Quindlen

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

Control is a nice concept, little more. — Anna Quindlen

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque. — Anna Quindlen

I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker. — Hillary Clinton