Top 300 Anna Quindlen Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.”

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

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

— Anna Quindlen

54. “If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They’d be inexpensive, too.”

— Anna Quindlen

55. “Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it’s sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.”

— Anna Quindlen

56. “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

57. “Socialized medicine, some still cry, but it’s long been socialized, with those covered paying for those who are underinsured. American medicine is simply socialized badly, penny wise and pound foolish.”

— Anna Quindlen

58. “You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.”

— Anna Quindlen

59. “Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.”

— Anna Quindlen

60. “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

61. “Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry. Control is an illusion; best intentions are the best we can do.”

— Anna Quindlen

62. “Begin the work of becoming yourself.”

— Anna Quindlen

63. “Look at the view and you’ll never be disappointed.”

— Anna Quindlen

64. “And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.”

— Anna Quindlen

65. “People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can’t manage it.”

— Anna Quindlen

66. “All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.”

— Anna Quindlen

67. “People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.”

— Anna Quindlen

68. “Guilt is what separates humans from animals.”

— Anna Quindlen

69. “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.”

— Anna Quindlen

70. “The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.”

— Anna Quindlen

71. “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

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

— Anna Quindlen

73. “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.”

— Anna Quindlen

74. “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

75. “Speech is the voice of the heart.”

— Anna Quindlen

76. “It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.”

— Anna Quindlen

77. “Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.”

— Anna Quindlen

78. “I only really understand myself, what I’m really thinking and feelings, when I’ve talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room.”

— Anna Quindlen

79. “The purse is the mirror of the soul.”

— Anna Quindlen

80. “Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.”

— Anna Quindlen

81. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

82. “I can’t think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.”

— Anna Quindlen

83. “I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.”

— Anna Quindlen

84. “And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It’s as simple, and as scary, as that.”

— Anna Quindlen

85. “Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.”

— Anna Quindlen

86. “My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.”

— Anna Quindlen

87. “Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.”

— Anna Quindlen

88. “You just can’t tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don’t read anything unless someone tells me that it’s really smart or illuminating. I don’t read any reviews anymore and it’s been really liberating.”

— Anna Quindlen

89. “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.”

— Anna Quindlen

90. “I’m going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.”

— Anna Quindlen

91. “That’s what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it’s the way we are.”

— Anna Quindlen

92. “It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows – and never forgets – that they are yours.”

— Anna Quindlen

93. “Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.”

— Anna Quindlen

94. “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.”

— Anna Quindlen

95. “All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.”

— Anna Quindlen

96. “I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it’s time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.”

— Anna Quindlen

97. “There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue.”

— Anna Quindlen

98. “You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

99. “Familiarity breeds content.”

— Anna Quindlen

100. “I got a fortune cookie that said, “To remember is to understand.” I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.”

— Anna Quindlen