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Mother Quotes by Anna Quindlen

26 Mother quotes by Anna Quindlen

All Mother quotes Anna Quindlen’s page

Anna Quindlen’s observations on motherhood read like a series of intimate journal entries, each capturing a slice of the complex emotional landscape of raising children. In twenty‑six pieces she moves effortlessly between tenderness and the occasional sting of reality.

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Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

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My mother was an incredibly loving mother.

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

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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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Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby,…

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When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about…

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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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I think a lot of people, but particularly a lot of women, get to this stage when I'd say they're over 50.…

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

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People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father…

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

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The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over…

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Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous,…

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

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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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“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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I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when…

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What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the…

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“My mother spoke, alive again inside my brain...She spoke and I listened to her, because I was afraid if I didn't her…

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I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything…

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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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When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts…But if…

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“As I looked at [my future husband] I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the…

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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,…

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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…

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

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

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

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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…

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

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“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…

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

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

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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 wander I…

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

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

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Not writing at all leads to nothing.

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

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