Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen
Anna Marie Quindlenis an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist whose New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth8 July 1952
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful marriage. You wouldn't believe how cheaply I can do a kitchen renovation.
knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.
I think a lot of people, but particularly a lot of women, get to this stage when I'd say they're over 50. We face a lot of hard judgment from the world, we women. If you're a full-time mother, you should be out working. If you're out working, your kids must be being overlooked.
This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.
It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I've explained fertile periods and birth control and all the other mechanics that are important to understand but never really go to the heart of the matter: I believe I will say that when you sleep with someone you take off a lot more than your clothes.
Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.
I only really understand myself, what I'm really thinking and feelings, when I've talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room.
We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.
Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.
Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.
So you're getting squeezed at both sides. You're taking care of your mom and dad and you're still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there's a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled.
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.
Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.