Anna Quindlen Quotes - Page 3

Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.

The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.'

Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

Your kids are launched. You love your work but you understand how to place it in the panorama of the rest of your life. There's this line in the book, and when I wrote it I thought yes, that's it - if you think of life as a job, maybe by the time you get to, say, in my case, 60, you've finally gotten good at it.

I think when people keep saying to you, "You're good at this," you just keep doing it.

I don't understand how people learn to live in the world if they haven't had siblings. Everything I learned about negotiation, territoriality, coexistence, dislike, inbred differences and love despite knowledge I learned from my four younger siblings.

My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.

The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you.

The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.

You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.

When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.

As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.

She say guilt is a useless emotion." "Oh, please," says Nancy. "Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.

All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.

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

This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.

Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.