Anna Marie Quindlen (born July 8, 1952) is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist.
Predictions that unit cohesion could not survive honesty about sexual orientation were simply wrong. What does threaten morale arethe prolonged investigations, the questioning of friends and co-workers, the searches of barracks for magazines and letters, the witch hunts.
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
Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too--unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A. M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child's trouble.
Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.
[I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement.
Frankly, I'm mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.
All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
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?
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, she will mention her girlfriends.
The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.
You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.
Barack Obama presents as kind of a cool character, and I think that that's his natural personality.
We are awash in the revealed world.
Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.
My mother was an incredibly loving mother.
A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.
[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.