Quotes by Anna Quindlen

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

“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.~ 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.”

“Its important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. Its the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. Its the way we talk about and treat one another. Its who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes the dinner. Its a state of mind. Its the way we live now.”

“I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesnt mean I dont still get an enormous kick out of infatuation;: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart.”

“Familiarity breeds content”

“I think that anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy”

“A finished person is a boring person.”

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the shalt nots of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Years Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and dont really think you look older because theyve grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, theyre used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and youve lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

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

Every story has already been told. Once youve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. Thats how life is most of the time, isnt it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. Its the getting there thats challenging.

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 biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

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

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.

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

those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone elses mind.