It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

— Anna Quindlen

I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.

— Anna Quindlen

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

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

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

— Anna Quindlen

My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person born on the hottest day of the year conceived on a Christmas Eve made by his father and me miraculously from scratch.

— Anna Quindlen

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

— Anna Quindlen

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

— Anna Quindlen

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

— Anna Quindlen

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds... I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books... It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

— Anna Quindlen