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Children Quotes by Anna Quindlen

54 Children quotes by Anna Quindlen

All Children quotes Anna Quindlen’s page

Anna Quindlen points out that parents often disappear from the debate about kids and violent TV, leaving children without guidance. She shares a mother’s struggle with a stubborn 7‑year‑old and wishes for children to grow up feeling secure and respected. Her quotes highlight the gap between parental responsibility and children’s needs.

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

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

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Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.

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When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

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“He’d had a dog once, in that way he’d had everything in his childhood, ordinary but a lot less lasting.”

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Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

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Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.

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“A loose end - that's what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight…

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I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly…

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Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs…

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I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child,…

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I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in…

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

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If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe…

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“I know from experience that those least capable of truly assessing any marriage are the children who come out of it. We…

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The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about…

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Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear…

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I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had…

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A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down…

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There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and…

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“I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage,…

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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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The dark aftermath of the frontier, of the vast promise of possibility this country first offered, is an inflated sense of American…

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“The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the…

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“Other people used photographs as a way to keep close to the events of their lives; she had used them as a…

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“I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year…

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“there is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolation. Add to…

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Jason Oliver C. Smith, a big dumb guy who was tan, died March 30 of lung cancer and old age. He was…

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[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few…

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Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept,…

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Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.

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“My husband and I have together created three children, but we have separate finances, and that’s the way I like it.”

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My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the…

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This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow…

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Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he…

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Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where…

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“The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone, convince us that our own foibles and…

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We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions,…

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And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

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

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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…