Anna Quindlen Quotes - Page 5

I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.

Americans like warm characters. It's why, no matter what he did in the early days, they kind of resonated to Bill Clinton because he seems like a guy that you could sit down and have a burger and a beer with. It's even why, despite the fact that he sometimes seemed to be not firing on all cylinders, lots of them still like George W. Bush - because he seemed like the kind of guy you could have a burger and a beer with.

I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.

Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.

A finished person is a boring person.

I really feel like if you can get past your fear, if you can say, "Uh-uh, I'm afraid to do that and I'm going to do it anyhow," that that's really the way to have a satisfying life moving forward. I think I had that kind of fearlessness even as a young person. It wasn't tempered by experience or wisdom, but it took me a long way.

You're like a cake when you're young. You can't rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.

A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.

[I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

Every story has already been told. Once you've 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 had.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

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

When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden intohistory, it is the stories we didn't write, the questions we didn't ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.

God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.