Top 300 Anna Quindlen Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Testosterone does not have to be toxic.”

— Anna Quindlen

202. “Occasionally someone will tell me that they won’t have pets because they’re messy, and I suppose there’s some truth to that, between the fur and the slobber and the occasional puddle on the floor. I have to choke down the temptation to respond that life is messy, and its vagaries go down hardest with those who fool themselves into thinking they can keep it neat.”

— Anna Quindlen

203. “But no one ever leaves the town where they grew up, not really, even if they go.”

— Anna Quindlen

204. “I’m sure not afraid of success and I’ve learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I’m afraid of now is of being someone I don’t like much.”

— Anna Quindlen

205. “Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn’t read, I don’t know what I’d do. But as a writer, it’s both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

206. “I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life. During.”

— Anna Quindlen

207. “I looked around and it was like I was seeing everything frozen into a still photograph, like I was seeing my whole life but in one of those shots you look and later think, Yeah, that’s what it was like, once upon a time. Once upon a time ago.”

— Anna Quindlen

208. “Because I’m learning that being a grandmother is not about the things you have to do. It’s about the things you want to do. The fact is that motherhood is mainly about requirements.”

— Anna Quindlen

209. “Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated...”

— Anna Quindlen

210. “It was a puzzle to her, how eagerly she’d rushed into life when she was eighteen or twenty, and in what a desultory fashion it had dragged out ever since.”

— Anna Quindlen

211. “Maybe everyone stays the same inside, even when their life looks nothing like what they once had, or even imagined.”

— Anna Quindlen

212. “There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.”

— Anna Quindlen

213. “All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

214. “He realized that there was a point to that ungainly empty area between the human shoulder and chin: it was the perfect place to rest an infant.”

— Anna Quindlen

215. “Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.”

— Anna Quindlen

216. “I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn’t mean I don’t still get an enormous kick out of infatuation;: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart.”

— Anna Quindlen

217. “It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

— Anna Quindlen

218. “This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver’s seat and keeping quiet.”

— Anna Quindlen

219. “I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.”

— Anna Quindlen

220. “The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it’s nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Country Quotes

221. “Then when she really thought about it she realized she’d been becoming different people for as long as she could remember but had never really noticed, or had put it down to moods, or marriage, or motherhood. The problem was that she’d thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product.”

— Anna Quindlen

222. “Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn’t ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.”

— Anna Quindlen

223. “I always have music on unless I’m reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It’s the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

224. “When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller’s Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn’t risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all. Maybe.”

— Anna Quindlen

225. “Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.”

— Anna Quindlen

226. “When hot dogs like Mr. D’Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it’s because they’re suffering from a disease. It’s called bull-imia, and it’s the regurgitation of patent hyperbole.”

— Anna Quindlen

227. “People froze you in place. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest.”

— Anna Quindlen

228. “I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

— Anna Quindlen

229. “There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.”

— Anna Quindlen

230. “I’m writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who’s prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovered about those additional years is that I don’t think they really are added to the end of life.”

— Anna Quindlen

231. “I don’t care that much about getting older, but I don’t want to be forgotten, because to be remembered is to live and to be loved.”

— Anna Quindlen

232. “I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.”

— Anna Quindlen

233. “It’s only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.”

— Anna Quindlen

234. “Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.”

— Anna Quindlen

235. “I’ve discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.”

— Anna Quindlen

236. “Nora remembered drawing in the sand of her future with a stick. What she couldn’t recall was when the sand had become cement, the who-I-want-to-be turned for once and for all into who-I-am.”

— Anna Quindlen

237. “People go through life thinking they are making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all. And along the way, they get a little damaged, lots of tiny cracks, holding together but damaged still.”

— Anna Quindlen

238. “Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.”

— Anna Quindlen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

239. “The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?”

— Anna Quindlen

240. “Sometimes things have to come when you’re ready for them.”

— Anna Quindlen

241. “Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.”

— Anna Quindlen

242. “All my life I had known one thing for sure about myself, and that was that my life would never be her life. I had moved as far and as fast as I could; now I was back at my beginning.”

— Anna Quindlen

243. “It’s hard to imagine yourself in the future. It’s why people do so many dumb things, because they’re mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we’ve made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.”

— Anna Quindlen

244. “It’s a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships... Because being a grandparent is determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with.”

— Anna Quindlen

245. “Don’t ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he’d been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.”

— Anna Quindlen

246. “Her face looks like a room with no drapes or shades.”

— Anna Quindlen

247. “When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women?”

— Anna Quindlen

248. “For so long I’d thought about myself as a girl who’d walked away from her mother’s life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she’d let me go.”

— Anna Quindlen

249. “All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.”

— Anna Quindlen

250. “People have writer’s block not because they can’t write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.”

— Anna Quindlen