Quotes from Anna Quindlen

For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.

Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives. [ Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright , Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

Speech is the voice of the heart.

I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.

It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.

When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother...When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone.

There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance

All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

In the aftermath of death Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.

February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.

For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast.

When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.

When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women? In some ways we're as committed to the old madonna-whore dichotomy as ever. And the Madonna stays home, feeding the baby behind the blinds, a vestige of those days when for a lady to venture out was a flagrant act of public exposure.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.