The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies.

— 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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