Anna Marie Quindlen (born July 8, 1952) is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist.
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.
We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.
I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.
A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.
I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.
There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows--and never forgets--that they are yours.
WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE WOMEN THAT HAVE MADE A REAL DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD THROUGHOUT HISTORY, WHAT THEY’VE DONE HAS ALMOST ALWAYS BEEN DEFINED BY FEARLESSNESS. STOP LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER - THERE’S NOBODY WHO MATTERS BACK THERE.
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.
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.
The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.
Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.
Barack Obama presents as kind of a cool character, and I think that that's his natural personality.
It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the colour of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.
New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.
If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.
I think there was a long period of time when we got real invested in a youth culture, and not coincidentally it was when the baby boomers, who let's face it, take up a lot of space on the planet, were young.
London opens to you like a novel itself. [. . . ] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.
I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it. . . why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer.