Anna Quindlen Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

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

  Anna Quindlen

  Travel, Book, Reading

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “How Reading Changed My Life”, p.70, Ballantine Books

• In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

  Anna Quindlen

  Dream, Book, Other Worlds

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “How Reading Changed My Life”, p.6, Ballantine Books

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

  Anna Quindlen

  Travel, Book, Reading

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “How Reading Changed My Life”, p.6, Ballantine Books

• A finished person is a boring person.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Reading, Individuality

• 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

  Trust, Stupid, Book

• Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Reading, Home

• There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.

  Anna Quindlen

  New York, Party, Moving

• Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

  Anna Quindlen

  Reading, Book, Fire

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.114, Ballantine Books

• London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Past, Long

  Anna Quindlen (2006). “Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City”, p.19, National Geographic Books

• 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.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Book, People

  Anna Quindlen (2006). “Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City”, p.7, National Geographic Books

• My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Home, Somewhere Else

• One of the things that got me on this topic for this book was that when I was researching the column I wrote in 2009 saying that I was stepping down from my column at "Newsweek" because I wanted to make room for newer, fresh voices out there, I discovered that in the year I was born, 1952, the average life expectancy of an American was 68. I was shocked by that figure and every time I mention it I hear a gasp from somebody in the crowd. Now, of course, we're more or less at 80, so that means that we've gotten 12 additional years.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Mean, Average

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think the gift of my mother's death, if anything so terrible can be said to have an upside to it, is that I was always keenly aware that life was fleeting, and that you'd better live while you have the chance. As I say in the book, since I was 19 years old I felt like I was living for two, and when I out-lived my mother, when I got into my forties, it felt like a miracle to me.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a "teachable moment.

  Anna Quindlen

  Teacher, Book, Son

• You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.

  Anna Quindlen

  Believe, Book, Love You

  Source: www.pbs.org

• When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

• I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Writing, Thinking

• I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.

  Anna Quindlen

  Strong, Book, Writing

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

• The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think might be important or pivotal, a lot of times I'll scribble notes down somewhere until I can get back to the book. Of course half the time I look at those notes the next morning and think, "What was that about?"

  Anna Quindlen

  Morning, Memories, Book

• Writing for UrbanMoms has awarded me a multitude of amazing opportunities. I have traveled to new places; alone and with my family. I have discovered new products, new books, new trends and new restaurants, and been able to share them with my readers. I've met other wonderful writers and many incredible celebrities.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Writing, Opportunity

  Source: urbanmoms.ca

• I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Thinking, Climbing

• Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.

  Anna Quindlen

  Fun, Book, Writing

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Writing, Thinking

• If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

  Anna Quindlen

  New York, Book, People

• Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Past, Mystery

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “How Reading Changed My Life”, p.32, Ballantine Books

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