Anna Quindlen Quotes

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person... view

By: Anna Quindlen

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat... view

By: 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... view

By: Anna Quindlen

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

By: 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... view

By: 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... view

By: Anna Quindlen

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me... view

By: Anna Quindlen

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?.. view

By: Anna Quindlen

But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated... view

By: Anna Quindlen

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security... view

By: Anna Quindlen

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child... view

By: Anna Quindlen

A finished person is a boring person... view

By: Anna Quindlen

Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you... view

By: 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... view

By: 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... view

By: 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... view

By: 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... view

By: Anna Quindlen

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever... view

By: Anna Quindlen

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger... view

By: Anna Quindlen

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America... view

By: Anna Quindlen

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

By: Anna Quindlen

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened.. view

By: Anna Quindlen

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?.. view

By: 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... view

By: Anna Quindlen

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

By: Anna Quindlen

People always blame the girl.. view

By: 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... view

By: Anna Quindlen

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children... view

By: Anna Quindlen

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

By: Anna Quindlen

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them... view

By: Anna Quindlen

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

By: Anna Quindlen

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

By: Anna Quindlen

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat... view

By: Anna Quindlen

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

By: Anna Quindlen

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle... view

By: 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... view

By: Anna Quindlen

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much... view

By: Anna Quindlen

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

By: Anna Quindlen