But it's 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 Quote

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 Quote

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

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 Quote

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

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 Quote

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
- Anna Quindlen Quote

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 Quote