Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

by Anna Quindlen

We were the daughters of women who had moved directly from their parents’ homes to those of their husbands, gone right from high school to marriage and motherhood. But my friends and I had gone to college, entered the work world, under the rubric of the New Woman, suddenly able through vast changes in societal mores to use our abilities in the world and combine them with a domestic life at home. We were the heiresses to a women’s movement that had broken the world wide open. But we were completely making it up as we went along, at work, at home, in our own minds, trying to be both our mothers and our fathers simultaneously. That wasn’t easy.

“We women today have more on the hard disc than any women at any time in history,”

Monogamy sometimes seems designed for a time when life was shorter and expectations lower.

The older we get, the more we understand that the women who know and love us—and love us despite what they know about us—are the joists that hold up the house of our existence. Everything depends on them.

There are endless studies that show that single-sex education, especially for girls, reinforces strength and diminishes the stranglehold of stereotypes, that it may lead girls toward everything from the study of mathematics to the pursuit of the Ph.D.

It’s not that we question authority, it’s that we question who gets to be an authority in the first place.

All I really know about myself is what the big rock outside my writing porch has engraved on it: “Nothing is written in stone.”

Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.

They arrive not because of the engraved invitations of careful planning but through happy happenstance, doodles on the to-do list of life.

the day my friend Lesley’s first grandchild was born, she sent out a message that ended, “You’re never too old to have the best day of your life.”

If your mother has been micromanaging your homework since you were six, it’s hard to feel any pride of ownership when you do well. You can’t learn from mistakes and disappointments if your childhood is engineered so there aren’t any.

Rise up, reach down.

“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”