Quotes from Anna Quindlen

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming

People froze you in place, Rebecca sometimes thought, trudging through the woods. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it.

The locals were pragmatic about their animals in a way the city people found callous.

That's why I ask." "What

It was just that she could not imagine what it would be like to share her life. She could not imagine not being able to switch on the reading lamp next to her bed if she could not sleep at midnight, or having to ask someone else's opinion on dinner plans or weekend guests. She had had her ways from the time she was young, and she had never had to change them.

And, above all, becoming a grandparent offers a chance to love in a different way, a love without the thorny crown of self-interest. I wish I could say I loved my children that way, but it wouldn't be true, and it wouldn't be true of anyone I know, either.

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.

the master bedroom with the cherry chest at the foot of the bed that holds the television, which rises up out of the chest at the touch of a bedside button.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

It was his very carelessness that she had initially found so attractive, as though to snag his attention for even a moment was a sign

She watched the

Death is so strange, so mysterious, so sad, that we want to blame someone for it. And it was easy to blame me. Besides, when people wonder how I survived being accused of killing my mother, none of them realizes that watching her die was many, many times worse. And knowing I could have killed her was nothing compared to knowing I could not save her.

Hmmm," my mother said, like she did when I gave her a composition to read and she was going to tell me to take another shot at it.

I can't quite recall, or evoke, that strange and powerful feeling that made me yearn to be with him every moment of every day, that made me think "till death do us part" sounded wonderful instead of simply like a very, very long time.

First we were so young and then we were so busy and then one day we awoke to discover that we were an age we once thought of as old.

The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone, convince us that our own foibles and quirks are both as individual as a fingerprint and as universal as an open hand.

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

In a world that seems so uncertain, in lives that seem sometimes to ricochet from challenge to upheaval and back again, a dog can be counted on in a way that's true of little else.

People froze you in place

When you look back on your life there are always times that you remember as the hard times, even if they're the hard times a girl has, not the hard times of a woman, with grief and loss and real hardship.

The difference between fifty and sixty is nothing; the difference between eight and eighteen is more or less a lifetime.

As with many marriages, hers was based on essential misconceptions. In her case she had been misled into thinking Peter was reliable, perhaps because he was very careful always to put cedar shoe trees into his shoes and because he always wore the same cologne, a bay rum that could be had only from a shop in a London arcade. It turned out that he was not reliable, just finicky about small personal things like that. He still used a shaving brush and a straight razor.

No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.

Sometimes I went out into the cornfield and walked between the rows with my eyes closed, pretending I was blind, feeling the stalks reaching out to brush me like a pat on the back.