Anna Quindlen Quotes

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.

~ Anna Quindlen

I don't even have a dog. I tell people I'm allergic so they won't think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of responsibility required.

~ Anna Quindlen

For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she'd let me go.

~ Anna Quindlen

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.

~ Anna Quindlen

H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. As she looked down at her dead child, Mary Beth realized that the unbearable sense of loss she felt was tempered by gratitude and a kind of relief. There would be no more boyfriends now, no more weekend parties. Ruby would remain pure forever, and for that her mother was deeply grateful. Catholicism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be having a good time . . . with your daughter.

~ Anna Quindlen

A loose end - that's what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight of small tasks, a life in which we fall into bed at the end of the day exhausted from being all things to all people.

~ Anna Quindlen

I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.

~ Anna Quindlen

I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.

~ Anna Quindlen

.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

~ Anna Quindlen

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.

~ Anna Quindlen

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.

~ Anna Quindlen

You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it's attributed to a whole raft of wits.

~ Anna Quindlen

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that two people are incompatible that is one is male and the other female.

~ Anna Quindlen

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.

~ 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

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.

~ Anna Quindlen

Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

~ 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

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?

~ Anna Quindlen

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.'

~ Anna Quindlen

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.

~ 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

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

~ Anna Quindlen

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

~ Anna Quindlen

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.

~ Anna Quindlen

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.

~ Anna Quindlen

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.

~ Anna Quindlen

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 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.

~ Anna Quindlen

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.

~ Anna Quindlen