I’ve been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me. — Anna Quindlen

We are awash in the revealed world. — Anna Quindlen

Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

I don’t know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it. — Anna Quindlen

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. — Anna Quindlen

If your success is not on your own terms, If it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. — Anna Quindlen

These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud. — Anna Quindlen

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. — Anna Quindlen

I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn’t figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

On social welfare the Church does so much good around the world–nuns running schools and homeless shelters, priests ministering to people who are in crisis. — Anna Quindlen

A writer is always working with whatever she’s managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world. — Anna Quindlen

It’s only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions. — Anna Quindlen

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree–or even, occasionally, the careless–may turn out to be half a life. — Anna Quindlen

In life, the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end. — Anna Quindlen

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America. — Anna Quindlen

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

The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have. — Anna Quindlen

Wow, so much of the way I’ve transacted my life… so much of the results that I’m happy about are because of what Daddy did. — Anna Quindlen

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed. — Anna Quindlen

Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory. — Anna Quindlen

The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn’t even occurred to you. — Anna Quindlen

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. — Anna Quindlen

The joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by The words of oThers. — Anna Quindlen

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes … it is so easy to exist instead of live. — Anna Quindlen

If we really feel like we’re comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around. — Anna Quindlen

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. — Anna Quindlen

You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life … Your entire life … Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul. — Anna Quindlen

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word. — Anna Quindlen

I can’t think of a single downside to motherhood now. — Anna Quindlen

The world is full of women blindsided by The unceasing demands of moTherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous. — Anna Quindlen

High fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later. — Anna Quindlen

Here is the real domino theory–gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

After all those years as a woman hearing ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m enough.’ — Anna Quindlen

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren’t valued in women. — Anna Quindlen

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

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

Women are the glue that hold our day–to–day world together. — Anna Quindlen

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

That’s what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it’s the way we are. — Anna Quindlen

When men do the dishes, it’s called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life. — Anna Quindlen

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I’ve discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage. — Anna Quindlen

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

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They’re its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones. — Anna Quindlen

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child. — Anna Quindlen

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn’t turn out that way he didn’t let the fact get in the way of a good story. — Anna Quindlen

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown–up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were. — Anna Quindlen

Children should have enough freedom to be themselves–once they’ve learned the rules. — Anna Quindlen

I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future. — Anna Quindlen

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

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked. — Anna Quindlen

I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it’s time for a zone defense instead of man–to–man. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older. — Anna Quindlen

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives — Anna Quindlen

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

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

All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid. — Anna Quindlen

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

The truth is that when you’re writing a novel you’re really living in it; you’re living in the house, and you’re living in the town. — Anna Quindlen

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