Top 150 Anita Diamant Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The world seemed so perfect, so complete, and yet so impermanent that I nearly wept.”

— Anita Diamant

102. “How did I get to be the woman I am today?” It started in that library, in the reading club. That’s where I started to be my own person.”

— Anita Diamant

103. “And then what do I do?” Joyce asked, her voice suddenly pinched.”

— Anita Diamant

104. “When I look at my eighty-five-year-old face in the mirror today, I think, “You’re never going to look better than you do today, honey, so smile.” Whoever said a smile is the best face-lift was one smart woman.”

— Anita Diamant

105. “You don’t ever get resolved. You just get older and life goes on.”

— Anita Diamant

106. “Sometimes luck was just another word for creation, which was as relentless as destruction.”

— Anita Diamant

107. “The Bible – it’s sort of the other person in the room. There’s this book, the reader, and the Bible.”

— Anita Diamant

108. “But I belong to that landscape now, to the sky and the mountains. I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.”

— Anita Diamant

109. “Is her name remembered?” I asked softly. “Dinah,” she said. “I like the sound of it, don’t you? Someday, if I am delivered of a daughter, I will call her Dinah.”

— Anita Diamant

110. “My early childhood was spent in Newark, New Jersey, but my family moved to Denver when I was 12.”

— Anita Diamant

111. “After the birth of a boy, mothers rested from one moon to the next, but the birth of a birth-giver required a longer period of separation from the world of men.”

— Anita Diamant

112. “At least she didn’t suffer.”

— Anita Diamant

113. “I am not certain whether my earliest memories are truly mine, because when I bring them to mind, I feel my mothers’ breath on every word.”

— Anita Diamant

114. “My house was a world of my own possession, a country in which I was ruler and citizen, where I chose and where I served.”

— Anita Diamant

115. “Weeping is terrible for the complexion” said Leonie, holding Shayndel close, “but it is very good for the soul.”

— Anita Diamant

116. “You told me about the other side of the universe, where darkness and light are not separated.”

— Anita Diamant

117. “As far as I can tell, common sense hasn’t been in fashion for a long time.”

— Anita Diamant

118. “Having all those women together in one place was like looking through a photo album of my life: from when I was a baby to the Saturday Club to Rockport Lodge to working at the newspaper to meeting Aaron.”

— Anita Diamant

119. “If you treat every question like you’ve never heard it before, your students feel like you respect them and everyone learns a lot more. Including the teacher.”

— Anita Diamant

120. “He that sinneth against me, wrongeth his own soul,” said Sammy, trying to sound menacing and angelic at the same time.”

— Anita Diamant

121. “Betty had never been skinny and she was never really fat. She still had a nice shape, but it was well upholstered now and her new dress made the best of it.”

— Anita Diamant

122. “I figure God created Margaret Sanger, too.”

— Anita Diamant

123. “Blood pounded in Ruth’s ears. She had never felt weaker or more confused. This was the moment she’d been living for, but the only thought she could muster was that her mother had not been Phyllis, as she’d been told, but Phoebe. The.”

— Anita Diamant

124. “The more I do bookstores, the more people come up to me from church groups. I spoke at Pittsburg State College and had 2 or 3 ministers and book groups from a couple of churches.”

— Anita Diamant

125. “Zilpah had little use for men, whom she described as hairy, crude, and half human. Women needed men to make babies and to move heavy objects, but otherwise she didn’t understand their purpose, much less appreciate their charms.”

— Anita Diamant

126. “Their coupling was the coupling of the sea and the sky, of the rain and the parched earth. Of night and day, wind and water.”

— Anita Diamant

127. “Some midwives said that pleasure overheated the seed and killed it. But others claimed that babies only come when women smile. This was the tale she told Jacob to inspire his caresses.”

— Anita Diamant

128. “His whole life he tried to make things better for poor children, but his real calling was being a father. It was a talent with him. As soon as our girls could sit up, he was wheeling them to the library and taking out books to read them bedtime stories.”

— Anita Diamant

129. “While Laban was glad enough of Jacob’s presence, the two men disliked each other heartily. Although different as a raven and a donkey, they were bound by blood and soon by business.”

— Anita Diamant

130. “Perhaps it was just the fact of his suicide that gnawed at her. To choose death seemed a terrible insult to everyone who carried on with the lonely business of living. As.”

— Anita Diamant

131. “She stopped and faced me and took both my hands in hers and asked, “Are you ready to swallow the moon at last?”

— Anita Diamant

132. “Italians are just as good as Jews when it comes to guilt.”

— Anita Diamant

133. “Even the oldest of us,” she said, shaking a bony finger at me, “even we crones can pick up new tricks here and there.”

— Anita Diamant

134. “They all agreed that things were better in the old days. Some of them were sad about it and some were bitter, but it was always, ‘Nothing is as good as it used to be.’ I swore I would never talk like that and you know what? Now that I’m an old lady myself, I think that most things are better than they used to be. Look at the computers. Look at your sister, the cardiologist, and you, graduating from Harvard. Don’t talk to me about the good old days. What was so good?”

— Anita Diamant

135. “Jacob accepted the situation. What else could he do? Furious, Rachel yelled at Adah, who cuffed her and told her to take her temper elsewhere. Rachel, in turn, slapped Bilhah, cursed at Zilpah, and snarled at Leah. She even kicked dust at Jacob’s feet, calling him a liar and a coward before bursting into pretty tears on his neck.”

— Anita Diamant

136. “Adah held the baby whenever Leah would put him down, and the joy of him lifted years from her face and the pain from her bones. But the illness that had wasted her strength could not be cured by even the greatest joy. And one morning she did not rise from her blanket.”

— Anita Diamant

137. “Jacob’s dogs were soon the envy of other men, who offered to buy them. Instead, he traded a day’s work for the stud of the male cur with cunning wolfish eyes. When the smallest of our bitches bore the wolf-dog’s litter, Jacob trained her puppies and traded four of the five for what seemed a mountain of treasure, which he quickly converted to gifts that proved how well he had come to understand Laban’s daughters.”

— Anita Diamant

138. “In Egypt, I loved the perfume of the lotus. A flower would bloom in the pool at dawn, filling the entire garden with a blue musk so powerful it seemed that even the fish and ducks would swoon. By night, the flower might wither but the perfume lasted. Fainter and fainter, but never quite gone. Even many days later, the lotus remained in the garden. Months would pass and a bee would alight near the spot where the lotus had blossomed, and its essence was released again, momentary but undeniable.”

— Anita Diamant

139. “I imagined them deathless, odorless, forever happy, strong, and interested in everything that happened to me.”

— Anita Diamant

140. “The boardwalk was mobbed like downtown at Christmas, only with the roller coaster roaring overhead. The beach was even worse. It was like an obstacle course of blankets and people. It was hard for him to walk on sand and the cane didn’t help at all.”

— Anita Diamant

141. “Remember when I used to chase you and your sister around the house to get my daily minimum requirement of hugs? I said if I didn’t get one hundred hugs I would float up into the sky like Mary Poppins and you would never see me again. We stopped playing that game when you started school, but we never stopped hugging.”

— Anita Diamant

142. “It took me until I was almost forty before I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

— Anita Diamant

143. “Could she be a friend to the writer of a bad book?”

— Anita Diamant

144. “And the way she laughed at my wisecracks and thanked me for my opinions made me think maybe I was as smart and funny as she said I was.”

— Anita Diamant

145. “I Have No Choice, Addie.”

— Anita Diamant

146. “I made her promise to write, but artists are artists, not writers. She did send postcards, though: a lot of postcards – sometimes.”

— Anita Diamant

147. “My worthlessness imprisoned me.”

— Anita Diamant

148. “Reverend Hartshorn’s face had puckered into a scowl. “This, er, passionate experience of the divine to which you lay claim is not necessarily evidence of salvation,” he said, choosing his words carefully. According to his theology, election was an absolute mystery; however, the notion that this foul-smelling lout could lay claim to revelation seemed monstrous. “The.”

— Anita Diamant

149. “I never cared for red headed men. I think they look like shrimp boiled to peel.”

— Anita Diamant

150. “I died but I did not leave them.”

— Anita Diamant