Quotes from Anna Quindlen

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

The ultimate act of bravery does not take place on a battlefield. It takes place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

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.

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.

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.

Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.

If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.

Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.

Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.

In life, the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end.

I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.

All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.

Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.