Anna Quindlen Quotes

“There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance”

“I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it… why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer.”

“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.”

“Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard and really amazing is to give up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”

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

“Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.”

“There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother… Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.”

“Some of my best friends are men. It is simply that I think women are superior to men. There, I've said it. It's my dirty little secret. […]
The other day, a very wise friend of mine asked "Have you ever noticed that what passes as a terrific man would only be an adequate woman?" A Roman candle went off in my head; she was absolutely right. What I expect from my male friends is that there are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.”

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.”

“Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.”

“the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.”

“A finished person is a boring person.”

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

“The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.”

“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.”

“And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.”

“All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.”

“Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.”

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

“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]”

“Speech is the voice of the heart.”

“Here is the real domino theory: Gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.”

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