Anna Marie Quindlen (born July 8, 1952) is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist.
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.
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.
Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
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.
You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some drunk comes around a corner and runs a stop sign.
Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.
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?
Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.
America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
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.
Familiarity breeds content.
Look at the view and you'll never be disappointed.
I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing. They're a dying institution in many parts of the world because they refuse to ordain women or married people. And now they're a dying institution because some of their members did enormous harm to young people and instead of responding aggressively with humility, and with love, and with the confession of wrongdoing, they tried to spin it as though they were a political party, and that's just deplorable.
When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.
It makes me angry to think that. . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.
Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
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.
Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.
It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.