Words matter. These are the best Anna Quindlen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
Raising a child is a little like Picasso’s work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.
And I don’t have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It’s almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.
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.
I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Children should have enough freedom to be themselves – once they’ve learned the rules.
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
But it’s important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.
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.
If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn’t have invented The New York Review of Books.
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.
If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.
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.
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.
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don’t discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it’s stupid. Banning books shows you don’t trust your kids to think and you don’t trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
I am an affirmative action hire.
People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can’t manage it.
Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you’d never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers’ incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?
A finished person is a boring person.
After all those years as a woman hearing ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m enough.’
All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
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.
There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.
There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
The problem… is emblematic of what hasn’t changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.
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.
