Quote

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
Bookshelves
Decorating
Consists
Mostly
Building
Enough
Children

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I don't understand how people learn to live in the world if they haven't had siblings. Everything I learned about negotiation, territoriality, coexistence, dislike, inbred differences and love despite knowledge I learned from my four younger siblings.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.
Anna Quindlen
Image
[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.
Anna Quindlen
Image
She say guilt is a useless emotion. Oh, please, says Nancy. Guilt is what separates humans from animals.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.
Anna Quindlen
Image
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
Anna Quindlen
Image
If you raise an intelligent girl she will become a feminist because of the facts of her own life. Raising feminist boys is more difficult. Raising egalitarian boys. One of the reasons you have to raise them that way is because it's better for them.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Anna Quindlen
Image
There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a teachable moment.
Anna Quindlen
Image
When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.
Anna Quindlen