Anna Quindlen quotes

Anna Quindlen is a renowned American author, journalist, and social critic. With a career spanning several decades, Quindlen's captivating storytelling has captivated readers worldwide. Known for her insightful observations on women's issues, family dynamics, and the human condition, she has gained wide acclaim and numerous accolades. From her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns to her bestselling novels, such as "One True Thing" and "Black and Blue," Quindlen has consistently delivered thought-provoking narratives that resonate with readers. Her unique perspective and remarkable ability to tackle pressing societal matters make her a distinguished voice in contemporary literature. Delve into the inspiring world of Anna Quindlen and discover the power of her words.

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Anna Quindlen

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Anna Quindlen

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.

- Anna Quindlen

Today is the only guarantee you get.

- Anna Quindlen

So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.

- Anna Quindlen

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.

- 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

Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That's what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first.

- Anna Quindlen

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Anna Quindlen

Speech is the voice of the heart.

- Anna Quindlen

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

- Anna Quindlen

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

- Anna Quindlen

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

- Anna Quindlen

Being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavour: 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

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

- Anna Quindlen

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

- Anna Quindlen

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

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

- 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

A finished person is a boring person.

- Anna Quindlen

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

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

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

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

- Anna Quindlen