1
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.Anna Quindlen
2
The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time. .Anna Quindlen
3
Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.Anna Quindlen
4
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."; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]Anna Quindlen
5
The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.Anna Quindlen
6
If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.Anna Quindlen
7
The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. .Anna Quindlen
8
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.Anna Quindlen
9
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
10
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.Anna Quindlen
11
Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...Anna Quindlen
12
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
13
It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.Anna Quindlen
14
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
15
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.Anna Quindlen
16
So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.Anna Quindlen
17
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
18
The joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.Anna Quindlen
19
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
20
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
21
I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they're not too terrible--well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones--and will reread something she's already read, even if it's something like a detective novel, when you'd suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesn't, and besides, I often can't remember who the murderer was in the first place.) .Anna Quindlen
22
It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.Anna Quindlen
23
Speech is the voice of the heart.Anna Quindlen
24
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.Anna Quindlen
25
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
26
A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.Anna Quindlen
27
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.Anna Quindlen
28
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
29
Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.Anna Quindlen
30
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 everAnna Quindlen
31
Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.Anna Quindlen
32
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
33
I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.Anna Quindlen
34
Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds.. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books.. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. .Anna Quindlen
35
London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.Anna Quindlen
36
All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.Anna Quindlen
37
I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage, and coddle, beginning with my children's father, who sat me down and told me in year two that I was going to create a little monster if I continuted to act as though "no" and "I don't love you" were synonomous.Anna Quindlen
38
In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain.Anna Quindlen
39
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
40
Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.Anna Quindlen
41
The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.Anna Quindlen
42
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
43
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
44
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 cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of responsibility required.Anna Quindlen
45
For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she'd let me go.Anna Quindlen
46
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
47
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.Anna Quindlen
48
H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. As she looked down at her dead child, Mary Beth realized that the unbearable sense of loss she felt was tempered by gratitude and a kind of relief. There would be no more boyfriends now, no more weekend parties. Ruby would remain pure forever, and for that her mother was deeply grateful. Catholicism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be having a good time . with your daughter.Anna Quindlen
49
A loose end - that's what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight of small tasks, a life in which we fall into bed at the end of the day exhausted from being all things to all people.Anna Quindlen
50
There is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolation. Add to the fact that in our competitive, perfectionist culture, in which the price woman are required to pay for freedom still seems to be martyrdom, almost everyone lies about motherhood. Part of that lying is loyalty - I can't let on that my kid is the only one on the playground who can't read or play the piano - and part of it is self-protection, since we've made hyper-motherhood a measure of female success. The preferred answer to the question "How are you?" is always "Fine, " and the answer to the question "How are the kids?" is supposed to be "Great! " That's true even if the accurate answers would be "terrible" and "a mess." I think it produces its own kind of desperation, especially for women, who yearn to be emotionally open.Anna Quindlen
51
I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.Anna Quindlen
52
I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.Anna Quindlen
53
.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.Anna Quindlen
54
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
55
In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.Anna Quindlen
56
You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it's attributed to a whole raft of wits.Anna Quindlen
57
My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person born on the hottest day of the year conceived on a Christmas Eve made by his father and me miraculously from scratch.Anna Quindlen
58
The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that two people are incompatible that is one is male and the other female.Anna Quindlen
59
A finished person is a boring person.Anna Quindlen
60
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.Anna Quindlen
61
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.Anna Quindlen
62
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.Anna Quindlen
63
Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.Anna Quindlen
64
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
65
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?Anna Quindlen
66
After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough, ' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'Anna Quindlen
67
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.Anna Quindlen
68
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
69
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.Anna Quindlen
70
The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.Anna Quindlen
71
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.Anna Quindlen
72
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.Anna Quindlen
73
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.Anna Quindlen
74
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
75
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.Anna Quindlen
76
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