Quotes By Anna Quindlen

But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

I am an affirmative action hire.

I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

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

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.

If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.

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.

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.

A finished person is a boring person.

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.

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

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

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.

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

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

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

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.

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.

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.

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