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Books Quotes by Anna Quindlen

53 Books quotes by Anna Quindlen

All Books quotes Anna Quindlen’s page

Reading feels like a constant companion and a source of sustenance, a home that stays with you. A book that once held all the mysteries of the universe can be reread unchanged while the reader themselves change, making the experience different each time. Writing happy stories is often the toughest challenge.

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“books became the greatest purveyors of truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

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The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living…

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When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of…

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

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

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We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

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Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

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the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of…

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Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't…

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“It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are…

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“It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye…

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My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the…

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Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off…

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Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word…

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“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of…

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London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences;…

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“I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad…

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“Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird…

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The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think…

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“I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as…

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

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“Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I…

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

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

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“Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The…

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

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

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

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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

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I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.

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I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their…

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those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about…

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

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

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“For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships…

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

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I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been…

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“A book--the book that was, for some reason, THE book--can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the…

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

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Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go,…

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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…