Anna Quindlen Quotes (50 Quotes)

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

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.

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.

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

It is so easty to waste our lives our days, our hours, our minutes...It is so easy to exist instead of live.

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.

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

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

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.

It's important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It's the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It's the way we talk about and treat one another. It's who makes the money and who

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.

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.

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

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.

Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous.

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.

Whether talking about addiction, taxation on cigarettes or education about smoking, there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum How come we8217re selling this deadly stuff anyway

I think that anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy

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.

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

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.

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?

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

It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

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.

I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn't mean I don't still get an enormous kick out of infatuation the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart.

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.

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.

A finished person is a boring person.

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling.

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.

When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women In some ways we're as committed to the old madonna-whore dichotomy as ever. And the madonna stays home, feeding the baby behind the blinds, a vestige of those days when for a lady to venture out was a flagrant act of public exposure.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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