Quotes from Anna Quindlen

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.

The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.

Think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree–or even, occasionally, the careless–may turn out to be half a life.

Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.

I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.

People always blame the girl she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible that is, that one is male and the other female.

In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

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.'

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?

E-mails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.

I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.