Top 399 Quotes & Sayings by Anna Quindlen

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.

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.

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

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

I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

A finished person is a boring person.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

I am an affirmative action hire.

If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.'

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

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

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.

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.

Today is the only guarantee you get.

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.

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.

So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.

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.

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