Anna Quindlen Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Shopping, Two

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.155, Ballantine Books

• 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

  Children, Thinking, Independent Bookstores

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.119, Ballantine Books

• I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

  Anna Quindlen

  Life, Children, Editors

• [After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Home

• All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Gay, People

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.29, Ballantine Books

• Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Regret, Past

  Anna Quindlen (2003). “Object Lessons: One True Thing; Black and Blue”

• Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.

  Anna Quindlen

  Memories, Children, Car

• This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Sitting, Keeping Quiet

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Every Last One: A Novel”, p.29, Random House

• Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Games, Play

  Anna Quindlen (2012). “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life”, p.121, Random House

• 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

  Mother, Strong, Children

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.101, Ballantine Books

• We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Writing, Who I Am

• The dark aftermath of the frontier, of the vast promise of possibility this country first offered, is an inflated sense of American entitlement today. We want what we want, and we want it now. Easy credit. Fast food. A straight shot down the interstate from point A to point B. The endless highway is crowded with the kinds of cars large enough to take a mountain pass in high snow. Instead they are used to take children from soccer practice to Pizza Hut. In the process they burn fuel like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow's coming.

  Anna Quindlen

  Soccer, Country, Children

• This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.

  Anna Quindlen

  Dream, Children, Perfect

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.5, Ballantine Books

• Jason Oliver C. Smith, a big dumb guy who was tan, died March 30 of lung cancer and old age. He was 13 years old and lived in New Jersey, Pennsylvania. At the time of his death, his license was current and he had had all of his shots. He is survived by two adults, three children, a cat named Daisy who drove him nuts, and his lifelong companion, Pudgy, whose spaying he always regretted, as well as a host of fleas who have gone elsewhere, probably to Pudgy. He will be missed by all, except Daisy. He never bit anyone, which is more than you can say for most of us.

  Anna Quindlen

  Dog, Children, Cancer

• 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

• I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Men, Hands

• A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Men, Long

  Anna Quindlen (2003). “Object Lessons: One True Thing ; Black and Blue”

• 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

  Mother, Children, Years

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.60, Ballantine Books

• The best thing about Sassy Seats is that grandmothers cannot figure out how they work and are in constant fear of the child's falling. This often makes them forget to comment on other aspects of the child's development, like why he is not yet talking or is still wearing diapers. Some grandmothers will spend an entire meal peering beneath the table and saying, "Is that thing steady?" rather than, "Have you had a doctor look at that left hand?

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Fall, Sassy

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.115, Ballantine Books

• I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Writing

  Source: urbanmoms.ca

• Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Littles, Cubism

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

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Freedom, Should Have

• It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows--and never forgets--that they are yours.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Giving, Feelings

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.90, Ballantine Books

• I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Thinking

• Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Grateful

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