Anna Quindlen Quotes

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.

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

The ultimate act of bravery does not take place on a battlefield. It takes place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

There were a thousand ways to imagine someone unhappy and so few ways to imagine someone contented.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

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.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]

It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

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.

I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychological one.

.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.