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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Thinking, Parent

• The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Talking

  Anna Quindlen (2004). “Loud and Clear”, p.36, Random House

• A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Women, Hair

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.51, Ballantine Books

• Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too--unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child's trouble.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Daughter, Children

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

• When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

  Anna Quindlen

  Running, Children, Parent

• And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Discovery, Piano

• Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Rights, Elephants

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