Top 300 Anna Quindlen Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

— Anna Quindlen

102. “I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn’t ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.”

— Anna Quindlen

103. “What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.”

— Anna Quindlen

104. “I hadn’t written a love story before and I hadn’t written a novel with a happy ending before.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

105. “By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.”

— Anna Quindlen

106. “When I’m falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.”

— Anna Quindlen

107. “If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.”

— Anna Quindlen

108. “You know what the opposite of ‘rise and shine’ is Bridge? ‘Good night, and good luck.”

— Anna Quindlen

109. “It is so easy to exist instead of live.”

— Anna Quindlen

110. “The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn’t even occurred to you.”

— Anna Quindlen

111. “I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.”

— Anna Quindlen

112. “We are awash in the revealed world.”

— Anna Quindlen

113. “I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.”

— Anna Quindlen

114. “Some people measure their success by the profession their children have chosen, by the purchase of a house, by how often they visit or call. But the only measurement, truly, is something that’s quite subjective: have you raised good people?”

— Anna Quindlen

115. “Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.”

— Anna Quindlen

116. “So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.”

— Anna Quindlen

117. “Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you’re tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.”

— Anna Quindlen

118. “A writer is always working with whatever she’s managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.”

— Anna Quindlen

119. “We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.”

— Anna Quindlen

120. “Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.”

— Anna Quindlen

121. “I think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.”

— Anna Quindlen

122. “Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.”

— Anna Quindlen

123. “We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.”

— Anna Quindlen

124. “But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.”

— Anna Quindlen

125. “Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.”

— Anna Quindlen

126. “And I don’t have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It’s almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.”

— Anna Quindlen

127. “You can get rid of the column. It’s a little like staying at a hotel; you get used to the shape of the room, and then you’re gone. With a novel you move into town and stay for a long time. That’s both comforting and terrifying.”

— Anna Quindlen

128. “Your hair isn’t quite right and maybe you’re a size bigger than you should be and on and on and on. I think there comes a moment when you’ve matured to the point where you suddenly think, nonsense. I am fine just the way I am.”

— Anna Quindlen

129. “It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women’s rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement.”

— Anna Quindlen

130. “I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.”

— Anna Quindlen

131. “Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy.”

— Anna Quindlen

132. “Out lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.”

— Anna Quindlen

133. “Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we’ll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.”

— Anna Quindlen

134. “It’s an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you’re a five-year-old, you don’t pay any attention to what anyone thinks of you. You just sort of are in your skin.”

— Anna Quindlen

135. “Over the last twenty years, we’ve changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.”

— Anna Quindlen

136. “Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.”

— Anna Quindlen

137. “In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.”

— Anna Quindlen

138. “In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that’s left of me.”

— Anna Quindlen

139. “He sold his watch to buy her combs, and she sold her hair to buy a watch chain.”

— Anna Quindlen

140. “Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.”

— Anna Quindlen

141. “I learned that if I ever claim sexual harassment, I will be confronted with every bozo I once dated, every women I once impressedas snotty and superior, and together they will provide a convenient excuse to disbelieve me.”

— Anna Quindlen

142. “We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming.”

— Anna Quindlen

143. “I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It’s fear that cripples us. It’s fear that accounts for racism, it’s fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.”

— Anna Quindlen

144. “New York is a city where it’s particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.”

— Anna Quindlen

145. “Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe.”

— Anna Quindlen

146. “No one, not even my father, not even my children, has ever loved me the way that man loved me, that’s for sure. There’s something satisfying in being loved that hard, maybe more than loving that hard yourself.”

— Anna Quindlen

147. “Frankly, I’m mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

148. “Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the next round of pontificating and so saved their strength by staying silent.”

— Anna Quindlen

149. “A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful marriage. You wouldn’t believe how cheaply I can do a kitchen renovation.”

— Anna Quindlen

150. “Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.”

— Anna Quindlen