Anna Quindlen Quotes

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

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.

A finished person is a boring person.

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.

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.

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.'

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.

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.

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

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

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

I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

Speech is the voice of the heart.

That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper.... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.

Acts of bravery don't always take place on battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.

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

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.

Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

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

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.

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

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?

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.

Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.

being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.

That's really what I want in a leader; I want somebody who's really, really smart.

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.

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

I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.

If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

I am an affirmative action hire.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.

We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

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.

Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.

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

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.