Anna Quindlen - People Quotes

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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
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 never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.

Anna Quindlen
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
I don't understand how people learn to live in the world if they haven't had siblings. Everything I learned about negotiation, territoriality, coexistence, dislike, inbred differences and love despite knowledge I learned from my four younger siblings...

Anna Quindlen
It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people's crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story, but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.

Anna Quindlen
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
People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.

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
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
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.

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

Anna Quindlen
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.

Anna Quindlen
Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion.... What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

Anna Quindlen
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
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.

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

Anna Quindlen