Quotes by 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.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys cant manage it.

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.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But youd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

“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.”

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

“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.”