I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
What's really hard and really amazing is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry. Control is an illusion; best intentions are the… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I really feel like if you can get past your fear, if you can say, "Uh-uh, I'm afraid to do that and… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“the older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us - and love us despite what… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
One of the things that got me on this topic for this book was that when I was researching the column I… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.” — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“In a world that seems so uncertain, in lives that seem sometimes to ricochet from challenge to upheaval and back again, a… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“She had filled her days mourning that shadow life, and it had no more meaning than the chattering of monkeys. Instead, these… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share 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… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job,… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write,… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
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… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us. — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
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… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“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… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once,… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
“Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I… — Anna Quindlen Copy Share Image
