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Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes

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Famous Anna Quindlen Quotes

“Ask any woman how she .... really makes it through her day, or more important, her months and years, how she stays steady when things get rocky, who she calls when the doctor says 'I'd like to run a few more tests' or when her son moves in with the girl she's never much liked and trusted.... She will mention her girlfriends. The older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us—and love us despite what they know about us—are the joists that hold up the house of our existence. Everything depnds on them." (from Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake)”

Friends
Author:Anna Quindlen
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“Ask any woman how she .... really makes it through her day, or more important, her months and years, how she stays steady when things get rocky, who she calls when the doctor says 'I'd like to run a few more tests' or when her son moves in with the girl she's never much liked and trusted.... She will mention her girlfriends. The older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us—and love us despite what they know about us—are the joists that hold up the house of our existence. Everything depends on them." (from Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake)”

Friends
Author:Anna Quindlen
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“Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.”

SocietyCrimePrejudiceImmigrationMoralsSocial ChangeSelf DeceptionExclusionParodyXenophobiaSocial NormsClass WarfareClichesNostaliga
Book:Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
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“I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they're not too terrible--well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones--and will reread something she's already read, even if it's something like a detective novel, when you'd suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesn't, and besides, I often can't remember who the murderer was in the first place.)”

Reading
Book:Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
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“The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.”

DeathFriendshipLossAging
Book:Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
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“After all, when you look at the faces of a class of graduating seniors, you realize that each student has only one thing that no one else has. 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. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.”

CustodyBank AccountLife Of Your HeartParticularsSoul More Than Mind
Book:A Short Guide to a Happy Life
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“There are two kinds of men: men who want a wife who is predictable, and men who want a wife who is exotic. For some reason, Peter had thought she was the latter. But even if that had been the case, the problem inherent remains the same-- once she becomes a wife, the exotic becomes familiar, and thus predictable, and thus not what was wanted at all. Those few women who stayed exotic usually were considered, after a few years, to be crazy.”

MarriageHusbands And Wives
Book:Still Life with Bread Crumbs
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“Who says great literatue has to be written by men? Who says great literature has to be about scary, creepy stuff like adulterers being punished and black slaves breaking loose and giant whales eating people? Why can't literature just be stories about women? Refined, respectable women have just as much to say as ignorant black slaves or bloodthirsty Indians or mad white whaling captains. Why do we have to pretend those people's lives matter more than our own?”

Literature And Politics
Book:Pride and Prejudice
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“It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.”

LifeCitiesHistoryLondonRenewalCity LifeMetropolisCircle Of LifeFictional LondonLiterary London
Book:Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
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“Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? [...] This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various Briths broadhseets, Goofy. They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways.”

TruthImaginationCitiesFictionLondonReality CheckPreconceptionsClichésFictional LondonRealiyLiterary London
Book:Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
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“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." [Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]”

WritingCreativityPoint Of ViewOriginalityCreative ProcessUniqueness
Author:Anna Quindlen
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“Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'.”

ReadingBooksReading For LifeTraveling Through Books
Book:How Reading Changed My Life
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“The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.”

ChildrenTimeMemories
Book:Loud and Clear
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“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. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.”

LifeValuesReadingDreamsBooksRefugeEscapeAspirationsJourneys
Book:How Reading Changed My Life
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“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.”

KnowsWayEyeKidsFallEasyGrowthHoursOur LivesMinutesWasteDisappearGrantedClockColourMelodyPaleFifthSymphonyAvenuesRise And FallEvergreensFifth AvenueClock TickingNew GrowthLimestone
Book:A Short Guide to a Happy Life
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“The dark aftermath of the frontier, of the vast promise of possibility this country first offered, is an inflated sense of American entitlement today. We want what we want, and we want it now. Easy credit. Fast food. A straight shot down the interstate from point A to point B. The endless highway is crowded with the kinds of cars large enough to take a mountain pass in high snow. Instead they are used to take children from soccer practice to Pizza Hut. In the process they burn fuel like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow's coming.”

WantFirstsKindChildrenCountryEnoughTodayUsedEasyProcessDarkPracticeCarPossibilityTomorrowPromiseFutureMountainShotsCreditEndlessSnowSoccerFuelHighwaysFrontiersCrowdedPizzaEntitlementFast FoodAftermathHutsInterstate
Author:Anna Quindlen
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“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.”

YearsChildrenPersonsMadeFatherBornRoomsSeaPossibilityInfiniteI RealizedMy ChildrenScratchesDeliveryInfinite PossibilitiesChristmas EveHottestDays Of The YearDelivery Room
Book:Living Out Loud
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“Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tried to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.”

FirstsWaterPayAttentionWatchesBabyPicksRedFingersSmellCirclesPay AttentionConcentrationPushingSaltBreezeThumbsPondsHawksSalt Water
Author:Anna Quindlen
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“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.”

IfsHumansLongSaidSometimesShowsMightViewsModernDesignTelevisionBearsIntelligentArguingBelieverDevotionErasMaryCheeseVirginsDeitiesSandwichesExhibitsTelevision ShowsFree TimeOmnipotentIntelligent DesignVirgin MaryEbayModern EraGrilled CheeseCheese Sandwiches
Author:Anna Quindlen
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