what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.

Anna Quindlen

Categorized in : People Matter Use

I had that feeling you have when you're watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn't exactly real, that it will be gone by the time you get home and make a cup of tea. I found a lot of life like that when I was younger, as though I was practicing for what came later.

real home feelings

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives

emotional reading spiritual

I think Americans suspect, without even being able to articulate it, that we're at the end of the American century; that we're at the end of the 100 or 125 or 150 years when we were the undisputed arbiter and leader of the world.

leader years thinking

I think a lot of people, but particularly a lot of women, get to this stage when I'd say they're over 50. We face a lot of hard judgment from the world, we women. If you're a full-time mother, you should be out working. If you're out working, your kids must be being overlooked.

mother kids thinking

While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.

personality wings ideas

I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.

xenophobia racism thinking

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.

writing fun book

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.

party new-york moving

I think when people keep saying to you, "You're good at this," yo... by Anna Quindlen

I think when people keep saying to you, "You're good at this," you just keep doing it.

people thinking

Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming... by Anna Quindlen

Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.

corners vision sometimes

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

parent literature rooms

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a per... by Anna Quindlen

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

persons literature wanted

Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.

compromise likes guy

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

abortion giving believe

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.

soccer country children

[I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement.

funeral balance justice

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric. by Anna Quindlen

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

rhetoric limits thinking

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

conformity realizing age

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.

mystery book past

Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time... by Anna Quindlen

Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

catastrophe beloved loss