Anna Quindlen Quotes

139 Sourced Quotes

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
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 books I have travelled, 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
There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.

Anna Quindlen
Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description. It is a strange business, making a living off other people's misfortunes, standing in the rubble with a press card as a nominal shield, writing in a crabbed hand notes no one else can read, riding an adrenaline surge that ends in a product at once flimsy and influential.

Anna Quindlen
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
I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.

Anna Quindlen
For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and-run driver — that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.

Anna Quindlen
Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage-managed by grown-ups and life privately held.

Anna Quindlen
All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.

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

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
What we call things matters.... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.

Anna Quindlen
Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.

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

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