Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.

— Anna Quindlen

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

— Anna Quindlen

Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.

— Anna Quindlen

So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time.

— Anna Quindlen

Speech is the voice of the heart.

— 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

The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live at 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 clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

— Anna Quindlen

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that two people are incompatible that is one is male and the other female.

— Anna Quindlen

The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.

— Anna Quindlen