Quotes from Anna Quindlen

It's one of the best parts of growing up and growing older, I think, that feeling that you'll just get through one day, and then the next, that a week from Saturday will take care of itself. I couldn't do that when I was younger. I don't know how much of this knowledge grows out of being female and having lived through layers of serial, often contradictory, lives.

particularly if they've had a few kids. It's hard to communicate to our male counterparts that one of the greatest gifts of growing older is trusting your own sense of yourself; their investment in their reflected image was not forged in childhood, as ours was.

There are two kinds of men: men who want a wife who is predictable, and men who want a wife who is exotic. For some reason, Peter had thought she was the latter. But even if that had been the case, the problem inherent remains the same-- once she becomes a wife, the exotic becomes familiar, and thus predictable, and thus not what was wanted at all. Those few women who stayed exotic usually were considered, after a few years, to be crazy.

Does anyone write texts or emails as substantial or as telling as what we find in the letters of the past?

sometimes you have to do hard things to your kids to do the right thing for them in the long run.

To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do," said Victor Hugo.

The worst thing about losing a friend is that you lose all the things you shared with that person

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

People to whom you could/should write letters: your mother and father your sisters and brothers your best friend the teacher who changed your life the nurse who cared for you in the hospital

knew, that for a birthday or a holiday or simply a dinner party offering, they could bring her a snow globe. Except that Dorothea was no longer charmed by snow

Here is what I know about dressing like your teenage daughter: She will always look better than you

I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.

I Remember how we put in a security system to keep intruders out of the house, and how we only used it when we went on vacations. It didn't matter: OUr intruder had a place at our table, kew where we hid the Easter eggs and where we'd buried the pet guinea pigs, was so familiar that when I saw him in the bedroom doorway that last time I thought he was my own son, come to kill me.

if you manipulate the scene you distort the image. In other words, don't Ã¢â'¬Â¦ move Ã¢â'¬Â¦ anything.

I sit on the sidewalk with a sign. Maybe you think its humiliating, but it's only humiliating if I feel humiliated, and I don't. What did Eleanor Roosevelt say? 'No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

One of his favorite words now is "Pop." There's no question that it feels good in his mouth, but it's not just that. In the way these things usually go in the house of family, Nana is wallpaper and Pop is a chandelier. "Pop! Pop!" he shouts now, searching for his grandfather.

children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes its only ones.

societies that eschew material possessions are happier overall.

How many times she had heard women in New York - maybe women everywhere, for all she knew - speak lyrically of how they would't see friends for months, perhaps even years, and then it was as though they had never been apart. Picked up where we left off was the common phrase. It was supposed to signal some magical communion, but if you looked it right in the eye, it came down to this: the kind of people they considered friends they might not even actually see for a long long time.

If a marriage is to endure over time, it has to be because both people within it have tacitly acknowledged something that young lovers might find preposterous: it's bigger, and more important, than both of us. It's love, sure, and inside jokes and conversational shorthand. But it's also families, friends, traditions, landmarks, knowledge, history.

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.

it's strange little moments that live inside you and keep peeking out the windows that open suddenly in your mind.

It's children, children whose parents' marriage is bedrock for them even if they're not children anymore. Perhaps especially if they're not children anymore.