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
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.
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.
those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...
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.
How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
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.
But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.
There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and their peers play such a huge role in their lives. If you offer independence, there is one kind of pitfall; if you shelter them too much, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.
Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.
Ever since the Evil Empire turned out to be a collection of third-world countries, Americans aligned on the far right have tried to cast gay men and lesbians as the new enemy, calculating deviants seducing the nation's young, anti-Avon ladies selling sodomy door-to-door. This simply won't wash. Just as seeing the Russians up close and personal on television humanized them, so seeing the lesbian grandmother of two little girls wearing her gold medal with pride makes the notion of otherness, much less deviance, silly and ignorant.
I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.
Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.
Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.
In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.