Anna Quindlen Quotes - Page 11

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.

I went to a women's college. ... it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool; I didn't learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by that time I was one hell of a kicker.

high fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later.

Jason Oliver C. Smith, a big dumb guy who was tan, died March 30 of lung cancer and old age. He was 13 years old and lived in New Jersey, Pennsylvania. At the time of his death, his license was current and he had had all of his shots. He is survived by two adults, three children, a cat named Daisy who drove him nuts, and his lifelong companion, Pudgy, whose spaying he always regretted, as well as a host of fleas who have gone elsewhere, probably to Pudgy. He will be missed by all, except Daisy. He never bit anyone, which is more than you can say for most of us.

I think 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.

Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy.

Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.

We are awash in the revealed world.

Testosterone does not have to be toxic.

If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.

The purse is the mirror of the soul.

If God is watching us, as some believers suggest, as though we were a television show and God had a lot of free time, the deity would surely be bemused by how dumbed-down devotion has sometimes become in this so-called modern era. How might an omnipotent being with the long view of history respond to those who visit the traveling exhibit of a grilled-cheese sandwich, sold on eBay, that is said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary? It certainly argues against intelligent design, or at least intelligent design in humans.

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.

There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.

Ever since the Evil Empire turned out to be a collection of third-world countries, Americans aligned on the far right have tried to cast gay men and lesbians as the new enemy, calculating deviants seducing the nation's young, anti-Avon ladies selling sodomy door-to-door. This simply won't wash. Just as seeing the Russians up close and personal on television humanized them, so seeing the lesbian grandmother of two little girls wearing her gold medal with pride makes the notion of otherness, much less deviance, silly and ignorant.

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.

It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.