Parenting Quotes by Anna Quindlen

My mother was an incredibly loving mother.

— Anna Quindlen

We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

— Anna Quindlen

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into…

— Anna Quindlen

“There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— 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

Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are…

— 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

“I think that the people I know now believe I went home to take care of my mother because I loved her.…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

“[B]oth my husband and I are the eldest in largish families and both of us had childhoods punctuated by pregnancies, the weeklong…

— Anna Quindlen

“The biggest mistake I made [as a parent] is the one that most of us make. … I did not live in…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

“That was the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from…

— 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

“Our parents are never people to us, never, they're always traits, Achilles' heels, dim nightmares, vocal tics, bad noses, hot tears, all…

— Anna Quindlen

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny…

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen