Anna Quindlen

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

A finished person is a boring person.

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.

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

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

But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

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.

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.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It is so easty to waste our lives our days, our hours, our minutes...It is so easy to exist instead of live.

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.

It's important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It's the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It's the way we talk about and treat one another. It's who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes the dinner. It's a state of mind. It's the way we live now.

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous.