Quotes from Anna Quindlen

If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.

even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand's editor should have taken care of).

To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived—to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that—this doubtless is the right way to live. —HENRY JAMES

The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.

There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around.

There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue.

Surely an American doesn't want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.

Sometimes things have to come when you're ready for them.

It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

The problem was that she'd thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product.

You got to live in the time you're living in. The past is the past, right

There was a weight to the emptiness of rooms in which you had once lived that was more fearsome than anything she had ever encountered in life, not because they were haunted, as she had joked with Skip Cuddy, but because they were not. The conversations, the quarrels, the long fraught silences, the tears: they had disappeared utterly and completely. A cemetery was a place intended to be still. It was here, where once there had been life

The rebels are firing all around us, yet for a moment it's so quiet you can hear your own breathing. Not a person but me in the world could deconstruct that sentence. If Meghan could hear her own breathing, it meant she was breathing fast. And since Meghan had a resting heart rate somewhere between coma and sleep because of all that swimming, if she was breathing fast, it meant she was afraid, which meant there was truly something to fear.

It's an essential part of maturing, putting fear aside, because if there's anything that cripples us it is fear.

He was quiet and thoughtful, letting her do all the talking until she would reach one of her acerbic pitches and he would murmur, You don't really mean that. But he had never seemed put off.

That's a naive comment from someone as intelligent as you are.... You always do that. The intelligence thing. It's as though if you're smart, you will understand yourself.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

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.

Occasionally Rebecca wished her son would not be so very kind to her, as though she was the losing pitcher on a Little League team.

the world is full of peculiar

My home was in that pleasant place outside Philadelphia, but I really lived somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

She had gone to a dinner party in her honor the night before the opening, and everyone had asked, with precisely the same intonation, as though it was a piece of urban Gregorian chant, Where have you been?