Quotes from Anna Quindlen

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

And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.

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.

Testosterone does not have to be toxic.

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.

When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.

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?

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.

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

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.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.

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

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.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

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.

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

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

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.

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.