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 More Quotes by Anna Quindlen More Quotes From Anna Quindlen I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth. Anna Quindlen advancement activity earth It is so easy to exist instead of live. Anna Quindlen easy I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. What I learned from it is that today seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly. Anna Quindlen journey giving years Look at the view and you'll never be disappointed. Anna Quindlen disappointed views looks It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all. Anna Quindlen men Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn't read, I don't know what I'd do. But as a writer, it's both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along. Anna Quindlen technique reading blessing 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 I only really understand myself, what I'm really thinking and feelings, when I've talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room. Anna Quindlen empty-rooms circles thinking I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy. Anna Quindlen alternatives fitness 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 writing book The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.' Anna Quindlen girl basketball sports What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone. Anna Quindlen women heart friendship Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity. Anna Quindlen distance summer lying 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 writing book thinking Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy. Anna Quindlen care sick kids The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed. Anna Quindlen good-dog good-person dog When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing. Anna Quindlen my-girlfriend girlfriend fall 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 winter two dirty You can get rid of the column. It's a little like staying at a hotel; you get used to the shape of the room, and then you're gone. With a novel you move into town and stay for a long time. That's both comforting and terrifying. Anna Quindlen comforting long moving Ever since the Evil Empire turned out to be a collection of third-world countries, Americans aligned on the far right have tried to cast gay men and lesbians as the new enemy, calculating deviants seducing the nation's young, anti-Avon ladies selling sodomy door-to-door. This simply won't wash. Just as seeing the Russians up close and personal on television humanized them, so seeing the lesbian grandmother of two little girls wearing her gold medal with pride makes the notion of otherness, much less deviance, silly and ignorant. Anna Quindlen girl silly country
