Anna Quindlen Quotes

139 Sourced Quotes

Those of us who read because we love it more than anything…feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.

Anna Quindlen
Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won't happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

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.

Anna Quindlen
The truth is that there's nothing sexy about nursing in public, a process that usually includes a deft disarrangement of garments and the weird stares of passersby and is quite like hiding a soccer ball beneath your shirt.

Anna Quindlen
Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

Anna Quindlen
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.

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
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
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
Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

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
I went to a women's college.... it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool; I didn't learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by that time I was one hell of a kicker.

Anna Quindlen
Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center.... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.

Anna Quindlen
I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

Anna Quindlen
I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

Anna Quindlen
Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.

Anna Quindlen
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 makes the compromises and who makes dinner. It's a state of mind. It's the way we live now.

Anna Quindlen
If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be inexpensive, too.

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

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
Sometimes a breast is a sexual object, and sometimes it's a food delivery system, and one need not preclude nor color the other. "A unique gland, an underestimated gland," one scientist who is studying breast-feeding enthused recently. Less sexy words were never spoken. And with good reason.

Anna Quindlen
Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

Anna Quindlen