The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.
Anna Quindlen
columnist, journalist, writer, novelist, children's writer
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All Quotes by Anna Quindlen
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.
I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.
The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.
Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.
If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be inexpensive, too.
People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.
Here is the real domino theory: Gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.
People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'
Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.