Quotes from Anna Quindlen

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

Our ability to understand, to embrace, to help, to know, to feel and to love is bounded only by our own emotional ambitions. The capacity to open ourselves up to one another is as huge as we dare to make it.

B]oth my husband and I are the eldest in largish families and both of us had childhoods punctuated by pregnancies, the weeklong disappearance of our mothers, and the arrival of yet another lozenge of a receiving blanket with a red face and a querulous cry. But being supplanted by babies was quite different from being in thrall to them.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invisible companion. ... I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning, I read because I loved it more than any activity on earth.

She knew any reasonable person would say she should downsize, downgrade, sell her apartment, but that was if you thought of an apartment as real estate instead of a home. She didn't want to sell her home. She thought of it as the last link to the self she had once been.

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.

After all those years of people counting off seconds in her earpiece, I swear she has time wired into every bit of her body, so that it was almost exactly an hour when she climbed out.

Perhaps we women are more willing to break the ice. Two things that made this possible most often in many of our lives were intimate friendship and reading.

When she got older, my mother, who was not a sentimental type at all, started to play around with poems. They weren't very good poems, but at every occasion she would write a poem and give it to us. And those are completely and utterly treasured." Her voice soft and warm and a little plaintive, she added, "Writing is the gift of your presence forever.

If you want help, you shouldn't act like a person who never needs any," my daughter muttered to me one night when I was angry, and for once I was at a loss for words because she had so completely nailed my modus operandi.

It's a funny thing, hope. It's not like love, or fear, or hate. It's a feeling you don't really know you had until it's gone. Three

And don't you, as do I, wish that person had left such a thing behind? Doesn't that argue for doing that yourself, no matter how terrifying or impossible writing may sometimes seem? It doesn't really matter what you say. It matters that you said it.

I knew the secret that was not a secret, that the molecules of the living world are always rearranging themselves so that something is lost, something is lost every day.

Mostly I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

The women I know who are happiest today are the ones who have close female friends. Maybe that's true of men, too, but essentially it's different.

If her love affair with Peter had stopped after six months it would have been a gorgeous memorable thing. But in love no one ever leaves well enough alone, and so it settles into a strange unsatisfactory kind of friendship or sours into mutual recriminations and regret, the dress pushed to the back of the closet, limp and so unnew, embalmed in plastic because of what it once was.

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

Sometimes she felt as though she was disappearing, that she was being whittled down to just this terrible feeling, like a sudden aching that appeared all over, not in her body but in her soul.

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.

It is interesting to discover how many people are disconcerted not because their parents are bad grandparents but because they are better grandparents than they were mothers and fathers.

Oh, the loneliness, the loneliness. It lived inside her now like an illness, like a flu that could be ignored and then would suddenly overtake and overwhelm her.

Then when she really thought about it she realized she'd been becoming different people for as long as she could remember but had never really noticed, or had put it down to moods, or marriage, or motherhood. The problem was that she'd thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product. Now she wasn't sure what that might be

We're part of a mixed marriage -- he's male; I'm female.

Peter was easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure. But Rebecca forgave him nothing. She told herself that this was not because he