Quotes by Anna Quindlen

It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.

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.

So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.

But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them.And I asked him why. Why didnt he go to one of the shelters? Why didnt he check himself into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as theyre not too terrible--well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones--and will reread something shes already read, even if its something like a detective novel, when youd suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesnt, and besides, I often cant remember who the murderer was in the first place.)

It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

Speech is the voice of the heart.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone elses mind.

The ultimate act of bravery does not take place on a battlefield. It takes 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.

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

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

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase the good old days has passed from cliché to self-parody.

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

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Its amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didnt come true become,after a while, simply the way things are.