Quotes from Anna Quindlen

The being happy. It's so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you're missing, or what you imagine you're missing. It's so much more peaceful.

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'd invented.

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.

You gotta love a country where there are rules for being poor, and rich people make them.

No one, not even my father, not even my children, has ever loved me the way that man loved me, that's for sure. There's something satisfying in being loved that hard, maybe more than loving that hard yourself.

Begin the work of becoming yourself.

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.

Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.

Dogs makes messes, it's true, but they clean them up as well.

as though I had been flat water and now I was carbonated.

Seek respect, not attention. It lasts longer.

Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What's tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil. I

the two dresses she'd brought with her in case of—well, just in case—stood in the corner of her closet like guests who have come to the wrong party and are backing out the door.

I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life. During

she had the odd sense that she had been missing something, seeing the world flat when everything was rounded.

kitchen with the window means we have finally arrived at some precarious level of prosperity.

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 hanging out with someone I like.

All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. 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.

In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that's left of me.

People go through life thinking they're making decisions, when they're really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all.

But once there were children, you couldn't zig where you had zagged. It was nothing but a parlor game, once you had children.

barn kittens scattered before his boots like dandelion fluff.

the events of The Group were matters that I was not supposed to know about, or even be capable of understanding. The attention of our elders focused on sexual activity, but perhaps other elements were even more corrosive of the conventions: disappointment, infidelity, duplicity, hypocrisy. In all of those books, too, there was a sense of forbidden female license that translated, at some subconscious level, into female freedom.

When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller's Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn't risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all. Maybe