Anna Quindlen

"When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother…When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone."

- Anna Quindlen

"There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother… Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too."

- Anna Quindlen

""When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother…When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone.""

- Anna Quindlen

"When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother."

- Anna Quindlen

"Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first."

- Anna Quindlen

"Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules."

- Anna Quindlen

"I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come."

- 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

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

- Anna Quindlen

"The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have."

- Anna Quindlen

"February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long."

- 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, ‘I’m enough.’"

- Anna Quindlen

"After all those years as a woman hearing, ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not thin enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I am enough.’"

- Anna Quindlen

"“After all those years as a woman hearing, ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not thin enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I am enough.’”"

- Anna Quindlen

"The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops."

- Anna Quindlen

"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."

- Anna Quindlen

"When in doubt, choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work."

- Anna Quindlen

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning to work on becoming yourself."

- Anna Quindlen

"I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less."

- Anna Quindlen