Top 300 Anna Quindlen Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Now, a lot of people are challenged by the fact that a record number of people in their sixties have living parents, and a record number of people in their sixties have kids who may still depend upon them.”

— Anna Quindlen

252. “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

253. “I don’t really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star; are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?”

— Anna Quindlen

254. “I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.”

— Anna Quindlen

255. “There comes that moment when we finally know what matters and, perhaps more important, what doesn’t, when we see that all the life lessons came not from what we had but from who we loved, and from the failures perhaps more than the successes.”

— Anna Quindlen

256. “The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.”

— Anna Quindlen

257. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” She actually sometimes thought that was the definition of marriage.”

— Anna Quindlen

258. “For most of my life the only ceremonies I’ve been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.”

— Anna Quindlen

259. “If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.”

— Anna Quindlen

260. “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

261. “Mrs. Blessing was surprised at how fluently she lied, much better than she’d done it years before, when it had been so much more important, at least to her. She realized that lying was easier than telling the truth because it had such nice smooth edges, not jagged with impossibility and inconvenience the way the truth so often was.”

— Anna Quindlen

262. “She is a prisoner in the amber of her own past.”

— Anna Quindlen

263. “You could argue they’d lost their way, in their choices, their work, their marriage. But the truth was, there wasn’t any way. There was just day after day, small stuff, idle conversation, scheduling. And then after a couple of decades it somehow added up to something, for good or for ill or for both.”

— Anna Quindlen

264. “If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn’t have invented The New York Review of Books.”

— Anna Quindlen

265. “To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived – to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that – this doubtless is the right way to live. – HENRY JAMES.”

— Anna Quindlen

266. “When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.”

— Anna Quindlen

267. “Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.”

— Anna Quindlen

268. “I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.”

— Anna Quindlen

269. “It’s so easy to be wrong about the things you’re close to. I know that now. I learned that then.”

— Anna Quindlen

270. “Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What’s tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil.”

— Anna Quindlen

271. “Life is short. Remember that, too.”

— Anna Quindlen

272. “Surely an American doesn’t want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.”

— Anna Quindlen

273. “You gotta love a country where there are rules for being poor, and rich people make them.”

— Anna Quindlen

274. “Anyone familiar with the love affairs between men and women could have told them that theirs would soon be over.”

— Anna Quindlen

275. “Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe only adults were stupid enough to think they knew exactly who they were.”

— Anna Quindlen

276. “I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.”

— Anna Quindlen

277. “Nora had discovered that by herself was a condition she really liked.”

— Anna Quindlen

278. “I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.”

— Anna Quindlen

279. “Well, we tell our kids things like ‘don’t gossip’ and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.”

— Anna Quindlen

280. “People froze you in place... More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it.”

— Anna Quindlen

281. “The gender gap looks at this point like it’s going to favor the president, particularly among white suburban women. I certainly think it’s going to be an issue. But I think the single most important thing in this election will be turnout.”

— Anna Quindlen

282. “This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.”

— Anna Quindlen

283. “You may admire, even love those photographs, but you don’t look at them and think What happened next? They have an immutable quality – that’s their strength and power. But there’s no question embedded in them. There’s a question embedded in all your work, that sense of ’what happens next.”

— Anna Quindlen

284. “There’s a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word “banal” sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say “underedited,” I say “derivative.” The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.”

— Anna Quindlen

285. “But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.”

— Anna Quindlen

286. “My friendships have a certain symmetry at the moment: Alice is always asking me what she should do, and Nancy is always telling me what I should do.”

— Anna Quindlen

287. “Wasn’t this what living in New York was supposed to be like, the skyline, the anonymity, coexistence without intimacy?”

— Anna Quindlen

288. “Nora had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror as she was applying mascara and realized that her skin had begun to look like silk after you washed it, serviceable but without its sheen.”

— Anna Quindlen

289. “It’s a lot harder to save people than you think it is.”

— Anna Quindlen

290. “It was easy to figure out how people ought to behave out in the world if you never went out in the world yourself.”

— Anna Quindlen

291. “There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around.”

— Anna Quindlen

292. “But once there were children, you couldn’t zig where you had zagged. It was nothing but a parlor game, once you had children.”

— Anna Quindlen

293. “They were photographs you had to explain, which meant they were a failure.”

— Anna Quindlen

294. “I think every fear you ever have, every one – thunder or spiders or roller coasters – they’re all fear of dying. Every last one.”

— Anna Quindlen

295. “In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain.”

— Anna Quindlen

296. “People go through life thinking they’re making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all.”

— Anna Quindlen

297. “It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented.”

— Anna Quindlen

298. “Perhaps instead of scaring ourselves we need to surprise ourselves every day. We are, after all, always a work in progress.”

— Anna Quindlen

299. “I hid my wounds because I was ashamed... but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced...”

— Anna Quindlen

300. “It sounded so promising. As if this would be the day. The day to ride a bike without training wheels. To make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding. To persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly.”

— Anna Quindlen