Anna Quindlen Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

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

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?

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

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.

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.

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.

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.

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.

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

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.

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

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

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.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.