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

by Anna Quindlen

I was getting older as fast as I could.

Petty grievances in marriage are like hothouse tomatoes: they get way bigger than they ought to, and they bear little resemblance to the real thing.

“If something bad happens, I go to my women friends for advice and my male friends for distraction,”

If the teenage girl had an ancestral crest, its motto would be “I am not you.”

But the measure of our real friends, our closest friends, is that we let them do the same for us.

What will we talk about? What did we talk about? Who knows? Who cares? It’s the presence at the other end of the line that matters: reliable, loving, listening, caring, continuing. What would I do without her?

once upon a time my mother had been someone else.

takeout being one of the unexpected linchpins of female freedom

“You should never forget that you will only have as much power as they are willing to give you.”

We hadn’t realized yet that motherhood is a various thing.

Often it feels as though generations shout at one another across a canyon with roaring water at the bottom, drowning out the words.

the crazed timpani of our existences at least meant that we were not in some domestic dead end. But I’m not sure, if we are being honest, that we would consider our alternative ideal.

The eldest child of two eldest children”: that is how our son once described himself, which I believe was subtle shorthand for “heat-seeking missile.”)

lapsing into the pat answer we absorb in the kind of obsessive miasma of free-floating worry we call parenting.

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

There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.

doodles on the to-do list of life.

They hang in the air somewhere to the left of my conscious brain, where my mind could pick them up if my mind had peripheral vision.

when I work out hard enough I feel like I want to go out and knock over a convenience store, and for a woman who grew up with her hands folded and her knees together, that’s one fabulous feeling.

That’s just another little story, and I’m refusing to tell it.

The old house has a leaky roof, rattling windows, a wilderness of a garden, a damp basement, bad gutters. All cons. I love the place. One pro that obliterates all the others.

The only constant was that somehow we all needed to be more than we already were, even if that meant playing a role that was essentially false.

“Parts of me I never even knew I had sometimes ache—but parts of me I never knew I had in my brain sing.”

“You’re never too old to have the best day of your life.”

he knew, and I was learning, and it made for an unbreachable disconnect.

How many for dinner—that is the essential question.

Nor is it soothing to let them loose to make their own decisions and mistakes. But it is the entire point of the exercise, shifting the balance, giving them a little more rope each year.

In my religion, martyrs die.

So, once again, do the younger ones benefit from our experiments on the eldest, who got me used to myself.

Sometimes on the way to the circus, or the car, or around the pond, the three kids walk side by side, their heads bent together, their words a kind of pigeon murmur, alto and undecipherable, and Gerry and I will exchange a half smile that means, my God, how did this happen? The alchemy of parenthood is so mysterious. It can’t be true that we were somehow responsible for creating these three unique and remarkable human beings. We didn’t know enough, do enough. There were endless diaper changes, baths, books, Band-Aids, doctor visits, parent-teacher conferences, plays and athletic events and family dinners, so much scut work. It’s as though we were working long repetitive shifts on an assembly line, and in the end we had the Sistine Chapel.

My plan is that a group of us will move together into our house in the country, with a crackerjack cook and a couple of aides. We’ll repeat the same stories, trash the same absent friends, secure in the knowledge that none of us will notice the repetitions.

And so, inevitably, we have created a kind of bottleneck, in the professions, in politics, in power.

“If you want help, you shouldn’t act like a person who never needs any,”

“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?”

faint unspoken schism

The bird has flown. Only the cage remains.

the afterlife might consist largely of electrical impulses, free-floating personalities, that since matter could neither be created nor destroyed, brain waves would endure.

This is the best place, here, now, alive,

“But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.”

there’s simply been too much layered upon the way she was

I want to see what happens next. I want to see the future and be a little bit of a crank about the past,