Quotes from Anna Quindlen

Nora had discovered that by herself was a condition she really liked

I was good with being alone, always liked it, but there's something about doing a job alone that you've always done with someone else that just doesn't feel right. Maybe it's like making Christmas cookies by yourself. There's nothing wrong with it in theory, but you're really supposed to be doing it with other people, and not just any other people.

It's odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn't know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I invented. And finally I was what I was again...Anna Quindlen

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 even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.

It's hard to imagine yourself in the future. It's why people do so many dumb things, because they're mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we've made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.

When one of you wanted one life, and the other wanted something completely different, there was a technical term for that: irreconcilable.

It was a puzzle to her, how eagerly she'd rushed into life when she was eighteen or twenty, and in what a desultory fashion it had dragged out ever since.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. —JAMES BALDWIN

I've always thought that Freud's theory of penis envy was fairly ridiculous -- but I'm absolutely certain that if you put a piece of bread in your mouth and suck on it you'll go to heaven.

There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word banal sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say underedited, I say derivative. The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.

But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.

Occasionally someone will tell me that they won't have pets because they're messy, and I suppose there's some truth to that, between the fur and the slobber and the occasional puddle on the floor. I have to choke down the temptation to respond that life is messy, and its vagaries go down hardest with those who fool themselves into thinking they can keep it neat.

How many times had she heard women in New York - maybe women everywhere, for all she knew - speak lyrically of how they wouldn't see friends for months, perhaps even years, and then it was as though they had never been apart. Picked up where we left off was the common phrase. It was supposed to signal some magical communion, but if you looked it right in the eye, it came down to this: the kinds of people they considered friends they might not even actually see for a long long time.

The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies.

she had certainly learned about not having enough money, which is different from being poor.

I don't care that much about getting older, but I don't want to be forgotten, because to be remembered is to live and to be loved.

It's so easy to be wrong about the things you're close to. I know that now. I learned that then.

A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If

It's a lot harder to save people than you think it is.

The essential London scenes is a row of low identical houses set around a square.

I looked around and it was like I was seeing everything frozen into a still photograph, like I was seeing my whole life but in one of those shots you look and later think, Yeah, that's what it was like, once upon a time. Once upon a time ago.

You may admire, even love those photographs, but you don't look at them and think What happened next? They have an immutable quality - that's their strength and power. But there's no question embedded in them. There's a question embedded in all your work, that sense of 'what happens next.

I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.

Nora had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she was applying mascara and realized that her skin had begun to look like silk after you washed it, serviceable but without its sheen.