Skip to content

Life Quotes by Anna Quindlen

81 Life quotes by Anna Quindlen

All Life quotes Anna Quindlen’s page

Anna Quindlen reflects that loss can become a muse, a character, and even the whole of life. She notes that feeling comfortable in our own skin lets us move into later chapters of life. She warns that wasting time leads to an existence that feels half‑alive.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

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

Image

Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.

Image

“It was like death, except I had to go on living.”

Image

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

Image

“...I had enough of real life everyday to last me forever.”

Image

“Out lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.”

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

“I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.”

Image

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

Image

The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you.

Image

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead…

Image

“the older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us - and love us despite what…

Image

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the…

Image

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into…

Image

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who…

Image

“It's odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was…

Image

You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth…

Image

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life…

Image

For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me,…

Image

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and…

Image

I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that…

Image

“When you look back on your life there are always times that you remember as the hard times, even if they're the…

Image

And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and…

Image

“Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And…

Image

One of the things that got me on this topic for this book was that when I was researching the column I…

Image

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted…

Image

I think the gift of my mother's death, if anything so terrible can be said to have an upside to it, is…

Image

“Here is my favorite biblical direction: Be not afraid. It's truly the secret of life. Fear is what stunts our growth, narrows…

Image

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I…

Image

“You make concessions when you're married a long time that you don't believe you'll ever make when you're beginning. You say to…

Image

“One of the greatest glories of growing older is the willingness to ask why and, getting no good answer, deciding to follow…

Image

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

Image

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

Image

When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.

Image

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

Image

I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehersal, and that today is…

Image

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

Image

If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out…

Image

Other authors on Life

More by Anna Quindlen

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write,…

Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is…

Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose…

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

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some…

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at…

“I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and…

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

“In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once,…

“Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I…

I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now.

It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

Not writing at all leads to nothing.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to…