Anna Quindlen

Speech is the voice of the heart.

— Anna Quindlen

I am an affirmative action hire.

— Anna Quindlen

I do tend to be almost kind of Pollyanna-ish person.

— Anna Quindlen

“She was my one true thing.”

— Anna Quindlen

Today is the only guarantee you get.

— Anna Quindlen

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.

— Anna Quindlen

The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

— Anna Quindlen

“You can keep the sectional,"she'd said. He hadn't, although it had been a bitch getting it out of the house, and he'd…

— Anna Quindlen

My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked…

— Anna Quindlen

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the…

— Anna Quindlen

“I've always thought that Freud's theory of penis envy was fairly ridiculous -- but I'm absolutely certain that if you put a…

— Anna Quindlen

I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had…

— Anna Quindlen

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as…

— Anna Quindlen

The women of my mother's generation had, in the main, only one decision to make about their lives: who they would marry.…

— Anna Quindlen

“Four A.M. and the darkness had a quality of inexorability and menace as though it would never lift, as though, without anyone…

— Anna Quindlen

Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden intohistory, it…

— Anna Quindlen

I'm just remembering myself at 22 or 23. I was all engine and no steering. (Laughter) I had the wheels but I…

— Anna Quindlen

I think that after a while you realize that your husband can't be all things to you and certainly you don't want…

— Anna Quindlen

I do get a sense that there's a huge disconnect between the political powers and what's really happening, so right-wing conservatives can…

— Anna Quindlen

So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

“Who says great literatue has to be written by men? Who says great literature has to be about scary, creepy stuff like…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

“Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I…

— Anna Quindlen

I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that,…

— Anna Quindlen

“Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but…

— Anna Quindlen

“Coincidentally the couple who had endowed it had lived in her parents’ building. They had had an eight-year-old with a pretty singing…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen