Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake Quotes

“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, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“One of the greatest glories of growing older is the willingness to ask why and, getting no good answer, deciding to follow my own inclinations and desires. Asking why is the way to wisdom. Why are we supposed to want possessions we don't need and work that seems beside the point and tight shoes and a fake tan? Why are we supposed to think new is better than old, youth and vigor better than long life and experience? Why are we supposed to turn our backs on those who have preceded us and to snipe at those who come after? When we were small children we asked 'Why?' constantly. Asking the question now is more a matter of testing the limits of what sometimes seems a narrow world. One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating conformity.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“I had that feeling you have when you're watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn't exactly real, that it will be gone by the time you get home and make a cup of tea. I found a lot of life like that when I was younger, as though I was practicing for what came later.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“It would take a hell of a man to replace no man at all.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“We're part of a mixed marriage: he's male, I'm female.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“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.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“It’s great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“My doctor says that, contrary to conventional wisdom, she doesn't believe our memories flag because of a drop in estrogen but because of how crowded it in the drawers of our minds.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“And then sometimes we become one of those people and are amazed, not by our own strength but by that indomitable ability to slog through adversity, which looks like strength from the outside and just feels like every day when it’s happening to you.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“Perhaps only when we've made our peace with our own selves can we really be the kind of friends who listen, advise, but don't judge, or not too harshly.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage, and coddle, beginning with my children's father, who sat me down and told me in year two that I was going to create a little monster if I continuted to act as though "no" and "I don't love you" were synonomous.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“One of the most important parts of tending our friendships is working our way, over time, into the kind of friendships that can support cataclysm, friendships that are able to move from the office or the playground to hospital rooms and funerals. Some of my married friends are widows now, and some are single, and some have lost parents and had kids who were lost to them for awhile. And even those of us who so far have been relatively unscathed know how important the bonds of love are, how they make a net so we don't hit the ground when we fall from the wire.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“Control is a nice concept, little more.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“Karma is a boomerang and a bitch.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry. Control is an illusion; best intentions are the best we can do.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“to a surprising conclusion about this moment in our lives. No, it’s not that there are weird freckly spots on the back of our hands, although there are, or that construction guys don’t make smutty comments as we pass, although they don’t. It’s that we’ve done a pretty good job of becoming ourselves, and that this is, in so many ways, the time of our lives. As Carly Simon once sang, “These are the good old days.” Lots of candles, plenty of cake. I wouldn’t be twenty-five again on a bet, or even forty.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“It’s hard to imagine yourself in the future. It’s why people do so many dumb things, because they’re mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we’ve made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“Perhaps instead of scaring ourselves we need to surprise ourselves every day. We are, after all, always a work in progress.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“It’s nothing short of astonishing, all that we learn between the time we are born and the time we die. Of course most of the learning takes place not in a classroom or a library, but in the laboratory of our own lives. We can look back and identify moments—the friend’s betrayal, the work advancement or failure, the wrong turn or the romantic misstep, the careless comment. But it’s all a continuum that is clear only in hindsight, frequently when some of its lessons may not even be useful anymore.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“ones who have close female friends. Maybe that’s true of men, too, but essentially it’s different. I used to have a line in a speech about my editor’s advice to write columns about what I was talking about with my friends on the telephone. “If my husband had to write a column based on his phone calls with friends …” I would begin, but I never got to finish the sentence because every woman in the audience would start laughing. They all knew that male phone conversations were designed to make plans, while their own were intended to deconstruct the world.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“There’s a quote I like from Mark Twain: “They didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it!”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“shifts. Younger people came along to criticize their elders, and their elders happened to be us.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

“of the useful things about age is realizing that conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life