Mrs. Blessing was surprised at how fluently she lied, much better than she’d done it years before, when it had been so much more important, at least to her. She realized that lying was easier than telling the truth because it had such nice smooth edges, not jagged with impossibility and inconvenience the way the truth so often was.

— Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day how to be human.

— Anna Quindlen

When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller’s Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn’t risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all. Maybe.

— Anna Quindlen

Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.

— Anna Quindlen

To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived – to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that – this doubtless is the right way to live. – HENRY JAMES.

— Anna Quindlen

There are ways and ways of dying, and some of them leave you walking around.

— Anna Quindlen

There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue.

— Anna Quindlen

Surely an American doesn’t want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.

— Anna Quindlen

Sometimes things have to come when you’re ready for them.

— Anna Quindlen

In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain.

— Anna Quindlen

This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.

— Anna Quindlen

It sounded so promising. As if this would be the day. The day to ride a bike without training wheels. To make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding. To persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly.

— Anna Quindlen

Life is short. Remember that, too.

— Anna Quindlen

I think every fear you ever have, every one – thunder or spiders or roller coasters – they’re all fear of dying. Every last one.

— Anna Quindlen

Perhaps instead of scaring ourselves we need to surprise ourselves every day. We are, after all, always a work in progress.

— Anna Quindlen

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

Don’t ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he’d been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.

— Anna Quindlen

But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.

— Anna Quindlen

People go through life thinking they’re making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all.

— Anna Quindlen

If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.

— Anna Quindlen

I hid my wounds because I was ashamed... but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced...

— Anna Quindlen
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