quotes by Anna Quindlen

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
— Anna Quindlen

""I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough booskelves.""
— Anna Quindlen

"A finished person is a boring person. "
— Anna Quindlen

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."
— Anna Quindlen

"""If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.""
— Anna Quindlen

"...the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others. "
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life (Library of Contemporary Thought))

"...those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers..."
— Anna Quindlen

"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."
— Anna Quindlen

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life (Library of Contemporary Thought))

"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."
— Anna Quindlen (Good dog. Stay.)

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
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— Anna Quindlen

"...but 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."
— Anna Quindlen

"The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging."
— Anna Quindlen (Object Lessons)

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991
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— Anna Quindlen

"While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness."
— Anna Quindlen

"Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung..."
— Anna Quindlen

"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."
— Anna Quindlen

"I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed...and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own."
— Anna Quindlen

"The rituals surrounding vacations among Manhattan's wealthiest and best-connected citizens are strange and specific. By vacations I don't mean country houses, which are part of the regular ebb and flow of life and which are frequently subjects for complaint - The kids never want to go! The caretaker missed the roof leak! The pipes froze! - as though having a six-thousand-square-foot, cedar-shingled cottage on five acres overlooking the ocean is nothing more or less than a constant test of character."
— Anna Quindlen (Rise and Shine: A Novel)

""Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself""
— Anna Quindlen (Being Perfect)