110+ Anna Quindlen Quotes On Books, Insightful And Engaging

Anna Quindlen was an American journalist, op-ed columnist, and novelist. She wrote her column "Public and Private" for The New York Times between 1992 and 1995 and was a Newsweek columnist from 1995 to 2011. Quindlen is known for her social commentary on modern culture and her humanist approach to contemporary issues. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Anna Quindlen on books, insightful, engaging.

Top 10 Anna Quindlen Quotes

1. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
2. There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.
3. A finished person is a boring person.
4. After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'
5. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
6. There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.
7. Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
8. 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.
9. America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
10. In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

Anna Quindlen Short Quotes

• A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
• That's really what I want in a leader; I want somebody who's really, really smart.
• I am an affirmative action hire.
• The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
• If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.
• Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
• Familiarity breeds content.
• In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.
• Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
• All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

Anna Quindlen Quotes About Books

Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. — Anna Quindlen

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books. — Anna Quindlen

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it. — Anna Quindlen

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them. — Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes About Thoughtful

I know a lot and have written a lot and have thought a lot about motherhood. — Anna Quindlen

For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, "The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does." — Anna Quindlen

We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am. — Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes About People

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

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

The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women. — Anna Quindlen

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

what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things. — Anna Quindlen

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

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. — Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes About Children

I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child. — Anna Quindlen

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them? — Anna Quindlen

I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future. — Anna Quindlen

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

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked. — Anna Quindlen

What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it. — Anna Quindlen

My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room, and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person, born on the hottest day of the year, conceived on a Christmas Eve, made by his father and me miraculously from scratch. — Anna Quindlen

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet. — 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. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes About Kids

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. — Anna Quindlen

Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place. — Anna Quindlen

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you. — Anna Quindlen

I think a lot of people, but particularly a lot of women, get to this stage when I'd say they're over 50. We face a lot of hard judgment from the world, we women. If you're a full-time mother, you should be out working. If you're out working, your kids must be being overlooked. — Anna Quindlen

Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work. — Anna Quindlen

Now, a lot of people are challenged by the fact that a record number of people in their sixties have living parents, and a record number of people in their sixties have kids who may still depend upon them. — Anna Quindlen

Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out. — Anna Quindlen

Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that. — Anna Quindlen

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod. — Anna Quindlen

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated. — Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes About Life

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle. — Anna Quindlen

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have. — Anna Quindlen

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display. — Anna Quindlen

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

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. — Anna Quindlen

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat. — Anna Quindlen

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

I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. — Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Famous Quotes And Sayings

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat. — Anna Quindlen

Acts of bravery don't always take place on battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world. — Anna Quindlen

It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want. — Anna Quindlen

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too. — Anna Quindlen

being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us. — Anna Quindlen

I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. — Anna Quindlen

I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia. — Anna Quindlen

We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American. — Anna Quindlen

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number. — Anna Quindlen

Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe. — Anna Quindlen

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition. — Anna Quindlen

I'm just remembering myself at 22 or 23. I was all engine and no steering. (Laughter) I had the wheels but I had no steering. I do think it's true that when you're younger, you're more likely to listen to all the naysayers, and people are always telling you how you ought to behave and what kind of job you should get and how you should look. — Anna Quindlen

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway? — Anna Quindlen

Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner. — Anna Quindlen

London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women? — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together. — Anna Quindlen

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much. — Anna Quindlen

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

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. — Anna Quindlen

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage. — Anna Quindlen

I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me. — Anna Quindlen

I think Americans suspect, without even being able to articulate it, that we're at the end of the American century; that we're at the end of the 100 or 125 or 150 years when we were the undisputed arbiter and leader of the world. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u. — Anna Quindlen

I feel about exercise the same way that I feel about a few other things: that there is nothing wrong with it if it is done in private by consenting adults. — Anna Quindlen

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female. — Anna Quindlen

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung. — Anna Quindlen

The Church does an enormous amount of good, and it carries one of the most valuable messages imaginable - that you should love your neighbor as yourself, and that if you have two coats you should give one to the man who has none. — Anna Quindlen

With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane." — Anna Quindlen

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on. — Anna Quindlen

Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life. — Anna Quindlen

People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs. — Anna Quindlen

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness. — Anna Quindlen

I'm a Catholic of the New Testament, I'm not a Catholic of the hierarchy. — Anna Quindlen

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance. — Anna Quindlen

All things being equal, I would choose a woman over a man in order to even the balance of power, to insinuate a different perspective into the process, to give young women something to shoot for and someone to look up to. But all things are rarely equal. — Anna Quindlen

Life Lessons by Anna Quindlen

1. Anna Quindlen teaches us to be brave and stand up for what we believe in, no matter how difficult it may seem.
2. She also encourages us to be open to new ideas and to embrace change, even when it is uncomfortable.
3. Finally, Anna Quindlen reminds us that we have the power to make a difference in the world, and that it is our responsibility to do so.