Anna Quindlen Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.

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

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

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

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.

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the colour of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

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.

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

When you look at the women that have made a real difference in the world throughout history, what they’ve done has almost always been defined by fearlessness. That’s something I came to at a certain point; I wish I’d come to it younger. Stop looking over your shoulder — there’s nobody who matters back there.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

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

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

Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.

I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.