Quotes by Anna Quindlen

“It's amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn't come true become,after a while, simply the way things are.”

“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 photograph...”

“I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up e...”

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

“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.”

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

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...”

“How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arri...”

“It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They...”

“Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the wor...”

“Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help m...”

“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 dis...”

“I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage, and coddle, beginning with my children's father, who sat me down and told m...”

“I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is...”

“In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces lik...”

“All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.”

“I had that feeling you have when you're watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn't exactly real, that it will be gone by the...”

“Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it t...”

“I don't even have a dog. I tell people I'm allergic so they won't think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of responsibility required.”

“Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.”