The collection / 76 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1952 AD

The ultimate act of bravery does not take place on a battlefield. It takes place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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02c. 1952 AD

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

Anna Quindlen / quote

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03c. 1952 AD

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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04c. 1952 AD

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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05c. 1952 AD

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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06c. 1952 AD

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever

Anna Quindlen / quote

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07c. 1952 AD

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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08c. 1952 AD

It's amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn't come true become,after a while, simply the way things are.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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09c. 1952 AD

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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10c. 1952 AD

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds...I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books...It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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11c. 1952 AD

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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12c. 1952 AD

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

Anna Quindlen / quote

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13c. 1952 AD

I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage, and coddle, beginning with my children's father, who sat me down and told me in year two that I was going to create a little monster if I continuted to act as though "no" and "I don't love you" were synonomous.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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14c. 1952 AD

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 / quote

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15c. 1952 AD

I had that feeling you have when you're watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn't exactly real, that it will be gone by the time you get home and make a cup of tea. I found a lot of life like that when I was younger, as though I was practicing for what came later.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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16c. 1952 AD

Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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17c. 1952 AD

The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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18c. 1952 AD

I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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19c. 1952 AD

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 / quote

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20c. 1952 AD

I don't even have a dog. I tell people I'm allergic so they won't think less of me. Instead I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of responsibility required.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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21c. 1952 AD

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 / quote

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22c. 1952 AD

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 / quote

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23c. 1952 AD

The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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24c. 1952 AD

H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. As she looked down at her dead child, Mary Beth realized that the unbearable sense of loss she felt was tempered by gratitude and a kind of relief. There would be no more boyfriends now, no more weekend parties. Ruby would remain pure forever, and for that her mother was deeply grateful. Catholicism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be having a good time . . . with your daughter.

Anna Quindlen / quote

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