Anna Quindlen Quotes

139 Sourced Quotes

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

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.

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

Anna Quindlen
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

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
A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.

Anna Quindlen
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
There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existence.

Anna Quindlen
The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.

Anna Quindlen
Being a parent is not transaction... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.

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

Anna Quindlen
It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

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
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
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.

Anna Quindlen
School prayer … bears about as much resemblance to real spiritual experience as that freeze-dried astronaut food does to a nice standing rib roast.

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

Anna Quindlen
The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.

Anna Quindlen
I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

Anna Quindlen