Anna Quindlen quotes

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

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 trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.

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

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

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