Quotes from Anna Quindlen

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 like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain.

This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.

There were a thousand ways to imagine someone unhappy and so few ways to imagine someone contented.

I thought I had a handle on my future. But the future, it turns out, is not a tote bag.

It sounded so promising. As if this would be the day. The day to ride a bike without training wheels. To make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding. To persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly.

He realized that there was a point to that ungainly empty area between the human shoulder and chin: it was the perfect place to rest an infant.

Acts of bravery don't always take place on battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.

Wasn't this what living in New York was supposed to be like, the skyline, the anonymity, coexistence without intimacy?

He sold his watch to buy her combs, and she sold her hair to buy a watch chain.

She thought that people sought marriage because it meant they could put aside the mascara, the bravado, the good clothes, the company manners, and be themselves, whatever that was, not try so hard. But what that seemed to mean was that they didn't try at all. 

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. She actually sometimes thought that was the definition of marriage.

You could argue they'd lost their way, in their choices, their work, their marriage. But the truth was, there wasn't any way. There was just day after day, small stuff, idle conversation, scheduling. And then after a couple of decades it somehow added up to something, for good or for ill or for both.

easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure.

Life is short. Remember that, too.

Nora remembered drawing in the sand of her future with a stick. What she couldn't recall was when the sand had become cement, the who-I-want-to-be turned for once and for all into who-I-am.

I think every fear you ever have, every one -- thunder or spiders or roller coasters -- they're all fear of dying. Every last one.

It was a kind of circular thing: to be the kind of person who would have taken Faith in, he had to be the kind of person who would take her back.

All my life I had known one thing for sure about myself, and that was that my life would never be her life. I had moved as far and as fast as I could; now I was back at my beginning.

You know what the opposite of 'rise and shine' is Bridge? 'Good night, and good luck.

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.

He'd had a dog once, in that way he'd had everything in his childhood, ordinary but a lot less lasting.

she had violated one of the basic tenets of any competent cook: she had purchased a turkey without comparing its size to the size of her oven.

Perhaps instead of scaring ourselves we need to surprise ourselves every day. We are, after all, always a work in progress.

They were photographs you had to explain, which meant they were a failure.