Quotes from Anna Quindlen

All the things we don't say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.

There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.

It's a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships... Because being a grandparent is determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with.

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

She had filled her days mourning that shadow life, and it had no more meaning than the chattering of monkeys. Instead, these last few weeks, she had seen what might have been had she not felt perpetually done out of something better.

My friendships have a certain symmetry at the moment: Alice is always asking me what she should do, and Nancy is always telling me what I should do.

So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.

Anyone familiar with the love affairs between men and women could have told them that theirs would soon be over.

Because I'm learning that being a grandmother is not about the things you have to do. It's about the things you want to do. The fact is that motherhood is mainly about requirements.

Some people measure their success by the profession their children have chosen, by the purchase of a house, by how often they visit or call. But the only measurement, truly, is something that's quite subjective: have you raised good people?

For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she'd let me go.

It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg's—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.

She is not what I envied in high school, the popular girl. She is something I'm not even sure existed then, the sure-footed girl. She gives the impression of being completely herself, and only a part of that impression is false.

People froze you in place... 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.

Then one day we suddenly realized that we had been keeping him alive not because it was good for him, but because it was good for us, because it was too hard to make the decision to let him go. And in the joyful bargain between dog and person, that is the one unforgivable cheat.

It was easy to figure out how people ought to behave out in the world if you never went out in the world yourself.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day how to be human.

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.

Her face looks like a room with no drapes or shades.

Just remember that sometimes you drift into things, and then you can't get out of them. Not to decide is to decide.

People froze you in place. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest.

Mrs. Blessing was surprised at how fluently she lied, much better than she'd done it years before, when it had been so much more important, at least to her. She realized that lying was easier than telling the truth because it had such nice smooth edges, not jagged with impossibility and inconvenience the way the truth so often was.

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.

Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the next round of pontificating and so saved their strength by staying silent.