Top 300 Anna Quindlen Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Confidence Quotes, Self-Care Quotes, Self-Worth Quotes, Emotional Quotes, Identity Quotes

2. “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading, Journey Quotes, Storytelling Quotes, Reading Quotes

3. “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

4. “Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.”

— Anna Quindlen

5. “If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.”

— Anna Quindlen

6. “Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.”

— Anna Quindlen

7. “In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “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.’”

— Anna Quindlen

9. “If an opportunity scares you, that’s God’s way of saying you should jump at it.”

— Anna Quindlen

10. “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.”

— Anna Quindlen

11. “I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehersal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.”

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

13. “The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.”

— Anna Quindlen

14. “Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.”

— Anna Quindlen

15. “Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.”

— Anna Quindlen

16. “In life, the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end.”

— Anna Quindlen

17. “Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.”

— Anna Quindlen

18. “We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

19. “When men do the dishes, it’s called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.”

— Anna Quindlen

20. “The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don’t listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, ‘We’ve always done it that way,’ I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.”

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

22. “Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.”

— Anna Quindlen

23. “Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.”

— Anna Quindlen

24. “In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.”

— Anna Quindlen

25. “I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.”

— Anna Quindlen

26. “A finished person is a boring person.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

27. “When you really want to say no, say no. You can’t do everything – or at least not well.”

— Anna Quindlen

28. “Today is the only guarantee you get.”

— Anna Quindlen

29. “I’ve been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.”

— Anna Quindlen

30. “A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Strong Quotes

31. “It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.”

— Anna Quindlen

32. “A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree – or even, occasionally, the careless – may turn out to be half a life.”

— Anna Quindlen

33. “When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother... When your mother’s gone, you’ve lost your past. It’s so much more than love. Even when there’s no love, it’s so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn’t know how much until she was gone.”

— Anna Quindlen

34. “Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Strong Quotes

35. “Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They’re its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.”

— Anna Quindlen

36. “Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

37. “There’s no greater happiness than doing something every day that you love, that you feel you do in a satisfactory fashion, and which both supports and gives you time to support your family. I felt so lucky to have all that.”

— Anna Quindlen

38. “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

39. “Children should have enough freedom to be themselves – once they’ve learned the rules.”

— Anna Quindlen

40. “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

41. “The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.”

— Anna Quindlen

42. “Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.”

— Anna Quindlen

43. “Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.”

— Anna Quindlen

44. “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.”

— Anna Quindlen

45. “I am an affirmative action hire.”

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

47. “Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

48. “Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, she will mention her girlfriends.”

— Anna Quindlen

49. “Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.”

— Anna Quindlen

50. “Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.”

— Anna Quindlen