People always blame the girl she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys cant manage it. – Anna Quindlen
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and dont discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, its stupid. Banning books shows you dont trust your kids to think and you dont trust yourself to be able to talk to them. – Anna Quindlen
But its important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated. – Anna Quindlen
After all those years as a woman hearing not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough, almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, Im enough. – Anna Quindlen
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But youd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools. – Anna Quindlen
Children should have enough freedom to be themselves – once theyve learned the rules. – Anna Quindlen
Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them? – Anna Quindlen
Im sure not afraid of success and Ive learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing Im afraid of now is of being someone I dont like much. – Anna Quindlen
I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display. – Anna Quindlen
If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children. – Anna Quindlen
The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with. – Anna Quindlen
Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number. – Anna Quindlen
I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words. – Anna Quindlen
In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat. – 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
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me. – Anna Quindlen
There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever. – Anna Quindlen
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. – Anna Quindlen
Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description. – Anna Quindlen
The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u. – Anna Quindlen
