Quote

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

Anna Quindlen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Children
Decorating
Kind
Consists
Would
Mostly
Think
Content
Thinking
Building
People
Grew
Literature
Enough
Bookshelves

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
My sister is a public school teacher. She makes far far less money than I do, and gets almost no public attention for her work. Yet I believe what she does is infinitely more important and more difficult than what I do.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.
Anna Quindlen
Image
If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I don't know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it.
Anna Quindlen
Image
We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.
Anna Quindlen
Image
London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
Anna Quindlen
Image
So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you always know that you pushed hard and aimed high. Take a leap of faith. Fear not. Courage is the ultimate career move.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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.
Anna Quindlen
Image
An election marks the end of the affair it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn't mean I don't still get an enormous kick out of infatuation: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.
Anna Quindlen
Image
... It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people's crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story, but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.
Anna Quindlen
Image
It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn't see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves.
Anna Quindlen
Image
the most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I sort of feel like it comes around again. That when you get to a certain age, when you've lived enough and you've got your friends to support you and your family to support you, you wake up one morning and think, yeah, I'm okay.
Anna Quindlen