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Get A Life In Which You Notice The Smell Of Salt Water Pushing Itself On A Breeze Over The Dunes, A Life In Which You Stop And Watch How A Red-tailed Hawk Circles Over A Pond And A Stand Of Pines. Get A Life In Which You Pay Attention To The Baby As She Scowls With Concentration When She Tried To Pick Up A Cheerio With Her Thumb And First Finger.

-Anna Quindlen

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Get A Life In

Anna Quindlen

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Get A Life In Which You Notice The Smell Of Salt Water Pushing Itself On A Breeze Over The Dunes, A Life In Which You Stop And Watch How A Red-tailed Hawk Circles Over A Pond And A Stand Of Pines. Get A Life In Which You Pay Attention To The Baby As She Scowls With Concentration When She Tried To Pick Up A Cheerio With Her Thumb And First Finger.

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Part Of The Problem With A War On Poverty Today Is That Many Americans Have Decided That Being Poor Is A Character Defect, Not An Economic Condition.

Behind Every Door In London There Are Stories, Behind Every One Ghosts. The Greatest Writers In The History Of The Written Word Have Given Them Substance, Given Them Life. And So We Readers Walk, And Dream, And Imagine, In The City Where Imagination Found Its Great Home.

I Have A Cat, The Pet That Ranks Just Above A Throw Pillow In Terms Of Required Responsibility.

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.

I Really Feel Like If You Can Get Past Your Fear, If You Can Say, "uh-uh, I'm Afraid To Do That And I'm Going To Do It Anyhow," That That's Really The Way To Have A Satisfying Life Moving Forward. I Think I Had That Kind Of Fearlessness Even As A Young Person. It Wasn't Tempered By Experience Or Wisdom, But It Took Me A Long Way.

London Opens To You Like A Novel Itself. [...] It Is Divided Into Chapters, The Chapters Into Scenes, The Scenes Into Sentences; It Opens To You Like A Series Of Rooms, Door, Passsage, Door. Mayfair To Piccadilly To Soho To The Strand.

In The Family Sandwich, The Older People And The Younger Ones Can Recognize One Another As The Bread. Those In The Middle Are, For A Time, The Meat.

Stereotypes Fall In The Face Of Humanity. We Human Beings Are Best Understood One At A Time.

All The Things We Don’t Say, All The Words We Swallow, And It Makes Nothing But Trouble.

I Think When People Keep Saying To You, "you're Good At This," You Just Keep Doing It.

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.

We Take Our Vitamins, We Go To Exercise Class, We Put On Our Seat Belts. And Then Something Blindsides Us And Gives The Lie To Our Carefully Constructed Facade Of Safety.

The Clearest Explanation For The Failure Of Any Marriage Is That The Two People Are Incompatible; That Is, That One Is Male And The Other Female.

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.

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?

The Issue Is Privacy. Why Is The Decision By A Woman To Sleep With A Man She Has Just Met In A Bar A Private One, And The Decision To Sleep With The Same Man For $100 Subject To Criminal Penalties?

Ideas Are Like Pizza Dough, Made To Be Tossed Around.

Get A Life. A Real Life. Not A Manic Pursuit Of The Next Promotion, The Bigger Paycheck, The Larger House.

I Think There Was A Long Period Of Time When We Got Real Invested In A Youth Culture, And Not Coincidentally It Was When The Baby Boomers, Who Let's Face It, Take Up A Lot Of Space On The Planet, Were Young.

I Never Think About Issues When I'm Working On A Novel. Issues Are Things That Happen To People In Sufficient Numbers To Elicit Widespread Attention; In Other Words, They're Just Life Happening. That's What I Think About: Life, And Telling A Story.

Every Story Has Already Been Told. Once You've Read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound And The Fury, To Kill A Mockingbird And A Wrinkle In Time, You Understand That There Is Really No Reason To Ever Write Another Novel. Except That Each Writer Brings To The Table, If She Will Let Herself, Something That No One Else In The History Of Time Has Ever Had.

Inspirational Life

I'll Tell You The Truth - I Went To A Women's College, Barnard, The Most Selective College For Women In America Today. If There's One Thing I Came Out Of Barnard With, Because It Was A Women's College And A Great Institution Of Higher Education, It Was Fearlessness.

What Had I Expected Of The First Child? Everything. Rocket Scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated Hitter. We Talked Wisely At Cocktail Parties About The Sad Mistake Our Mothers Had Made In Pinning All Their Hopes And Dreams On Us. We Were Full Of It.

And Sometimes You Do Everything Right And Something Bad Just Happens. It's As Simple, And As Scary, As That.

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.

Novels Are Usually Built On Conflict, Sometimes Very, Very Difficult Conflict. It's Why Men Write War Novels - Because There You Go, There's The Conflict Writ Large.

I Can't Think Of A Single Downside To Motherhood Now.

After All Those Years As A Woman Hearing 'not Thin Enough, Not Pretty Enough, Not Smart Enough, Not This Enough, Not That Enough,' Almost Overnight I Woke Up One Morning And Thought, 'i'm Enough.'

It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live.

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?"

Like Cellulite Creams Or Hair-loss Tonics, Capital Punishment Is One Of Those Panaceas That Isn't. Only It Costs A Whole Lot More.

I Really Feel Like I'm A Liberal Because I'm A Catholic, Because I Took The Words Of The New Testament To Heart.

Books Are The Plane, And The Train, And The Road. They Are The Destination, And The Journey. They Are Home.

It's Only Before Realities Set In That We Can Treasure Our Delusions.

The Victim Mentality May Be The Last Uncomplicated Thing About Life In America.

One Of The Useful Things About Age Is Realizing Conventional Wisdom Is Often Simply Inertia With A Candy Coating Of Conformity.

Amid Attempts To Protect Elephants From Ivory Poachers And Dolphins From Tuna Nets, The Rights Of Children Go Remarkably Unremarked.

You Want To Have Fun With Your Kids, And No One Has Fun With Someone Who Runs Roughshod.

The Truth Is That When You're Writing A Novel You're Really Living In It; You're Living In The House, And You're Living In The Town.

I Do Get A Sense That There's A Huge Disconnect Between The Political Powers And What's Really Happening, So Right-wing Conservatives Can Talk About Contraception All They Want, But The Women Of America Are Using Birth Control. It's As Simple As That.

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.

The New Testament Has Had A Really Powerful Effect On How I Write And How I Live My Life.

The Joy Of Someone Who Had Been A Reader All Her Life, Whose World Had Been Immeasurably Enlarged By The Words Of Others.

If I Had To Guess What The New Etch-a-sketch Picture Is Going To Be Like, It's Going To Be Considerably Less To The Right. Romney Has Backed Himself Into A Couple Of Corners That I Don't Think Will Serve Him Well In The General Election, The Main One Being Very Harsh Stands On Immigration, Which I Think Are Not Only Short-sighted But To My Mind Immoral.

I Know The Difference Now Between Dedication And Infatuation. That Doesn't Mean I Don't Still Get An Enormous Kick Out Of Infatuation;: The Exciting Ephemera, The Punch In The Stomach, The Adrenaline To The Heart.

I Learned To Love The Journey, Not The Destination. I Learned That This Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, And That Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get.

I Read And Walked For Miles At Night Along The Beach, Writing Bad Blank Verse And Searching Endlessly For Someone Wonderful Who Would Step Out Of The Darkness And Change My Life. It Never Crossed My Mind That That Person Could Be Me.

I Go Online All The Time, I Just Don't Read About Myself. I Read A Fashion Website Called Go Fug Yourself. I Actually Correspond With The Fug Girls And That's Great.

On The Other Hand, I Think That Governor Romney Has To Worry That His Turnout Is Going To Be Low, That He Is Not Going To Bring Out The Evangelicals, That He Is Not Going To Bring Out The Tea Party Stalwarts. If He Does Not, Then It's Pretty Clear That He Will Lose The Election. So I Think Turnout In Key Groups Is Going To Be Really, Really Key On Election Day.

Real Friends Offer Both Hard Truths And Soft Landings And Realize That It's Sometimes More Important To Be Nice Than To Be Honest.

It's What The Taliban Does In Afghanistan, It's What Gets Done In The Middle East, And It's Clearly Something That Certain Mainly Conservative Groups In The United States Would Like To Do. They Miss The Good Old Days, When Men Were Men And Women Were Nothing.

Ignorant Free Speech Often Works Against The Speaker. That Is One Of Several Reasons Why It Must Be Given Rein Instead Of Suppressed.

Obama Doesn't Seem Like A Burger And A Beer Kind Of Guy. I Have To Say, I Don't Find That Problematic At All.

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.

I Always Wanted To Be A Fiction Writer, But I Couldn't Figure Out How You Could Be A Novelist And Make Any Money, Which Continues To Be A Problem For Novelists The World Over.

Sometimes We Don't See Out Of Our Peripheral Vision What's Coming Right Around The Corner.

Down Time Is Where We Become Ourselves... A Hiatus That Passes For Boredom But Is Really The Quiet Moving Of The Wheels Inside That Fuel Creativity.

Women Who Marry Early Are Often Overly Enamored Of The Kind Of Man Who Looks Great In Wedding Pictures And Passes The Maid Of Honor His Telephone Number.

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.

Frankly, I'm Mainly Telling The Story To Myself. Thinking About Audience Is Too Daunting, And Worst Case, Invites You To Homogenize, To Soften The Hard Edges Of Things.

I Would Even Go To Washington, Which Is Saying Something For Me, Just To Glimpse Jane Q. Public, Being Sworn In As The First Female President Of The United States, While Her Husband Holds The Bible And Wears A Silly Pill Box Hat And Matching Coat.

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.

Ask Any Woman How She Makes It Through The Day, And She May Mention Her Calendar, Her To-do Lists, Her Babysitter. But If You Push Her On How She Really Makes It Through Her Day, She Will Mention Her Girlfriends.

Being Accused Of Making Money By Selling Sex In Hollywood, Home Of The Casting Couch And The Gratuitous Nude Scene, Is So Rich With Irony That It's A Better Subject For A Comic Novel Than A Column.... On One Coast The Cops Are Busting Sex Workers On Eighth Avenue, Dragging Them Downtown To Night Court Where They Pay The Fine And Go Right Back To Their Corner; On Another They're Charging Heidi Fleiss With Pandering In A Town In Which The Verb Is An Art Form.

Well, We Tell Our Kids Things Like 'don't Gossip' And Then An Hour Later They Hear Us On The Phone. Stuff Like That.

I Was Very Driven, Very Focused, Very Ambitious. I Mean, When I Look Back On Myself In My 20s, Part Of Me Just Cringes.

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.

I Will Never Understand People Who Think That The Way To Show Their Righteous Opposition To Sexual Freedom Is To Write Letters Full Of Filthy Words.

I'm Always Keeping An Eye On The Court. Also, When The Members Of Congress Came To His Office During The Budget Debacle Of A Year And A Half Back And Said, "we Want To De-fund Planned Parenthood," He Said, "not Going To Happen." Those Apparently Were More Or Less His Exact Words.

If Men Got Pregnant, There Would Be Safe, Reliable Methods Of Birth Control. They'd Be Cheap, Too.

I Hadn't Written A Love Story Before And I Hadn't Written A Novel With A Happy Ending Before.

Athletes Are American Princes And The Locker Room Is Their Castle. Some Of Them Behave In Princely Fashion, Become Legitimate Heroes To Us All. And Some Are Jerks.

I Wondered Why I Hadn't Loved That Day More, Why I Hadn't Savored Every Bit Of It...why I Hadn't Known How Good It Was To Live So Normally, So Everyday. But You Only Know That, I Suppose, After It's Not Normal And Every Day Any Longer.

A Writer Is Always Working With Whatever She's Managed To Store In The Brainpan Or Puzzle Out About The World.

It Is Difficult For Me To Imagine The Same Dedication To Women's Rights On The Part Of The Kind Of Man Who Lives In Partnership With Someone He Likes And Respects, And The Kind Of Man Who Considers Breast-augmentation Surgery Self-improvement.

The Thing That Is Really Hard, And Really Amazing, Is Giving Up On Being Perfect And Beginning The Work Of Becoming Yourself.

I Can't Think Of Anything To Write About Except Families. They Are A Metaphor For Every Other Part Of Society.

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.

I Know A Lot And Have Written A Lot And Have Thought A Lot About Motherhood.

People Who Are Knowledgeable About Poetry Sometimes Discuss It In That Knowing, Rather Hateful Way In Which Oenophiles Talk About Wine: Robust, Delicate, Muscular. This Has Nothing To Do With How Most Of Us Experience It, The Heart Coming Around The Corner And Unexpectedly Running Into The Mind. Of All The Words That Have Stuck To The Ribs Of My Soul, Poetry Has Been The Most Filling.

The Misdeeds Of Ordinary Men Can Be Buried With Them, And Their Lives Described In Half-truths That Are Really Half-lies. But Not A Public Man. Particularly Not This One.

I Hope Readers Will Do What I Do When I Read A Novel I Like: Talk In Ways That Will Illuminate Their Own Lives.

Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get.

People Ask Me All The Time If I'm From A Family Of Writers. The Literal Short Answer Is No, But My Father And His Brothers And Sisters And His Mother Are All People Who Would Sit Around With A Tom Collins And Tell Stories That Seemed To Get Better And Better Each Time They Told Them.

I Once Wanted To Be A Personage. Now I Am Comfortable Being A Person.

I Haven't Seen So Much Tippy-toeing Around Since The Last Time I Went To The Ballet. When Members Of The Arts Community Were Askedthis Week About One Of Their Biggest Benefactors, Philip Morris, And Its Requests That They Lobby The New York City Council On The Company's Behalf, The Pas De Deux Of Self- Justification Was So Painstakingly Choreographed That It Constituted A Performance All By Itself.

I Love Having A President Who I Think Is Smarter Than I Am.

The Great Motherhood Friendships Are The Ones In Which Two Women Can Admit [how Difficult Mothering Is] Quietly To Each Other, Over Cups Of Tea At A Table Sticky With Spilled Apple Juice And Littered With Markers Without Tops.

My Father Expected His First Child To Be A Boy, And When It Didn't Turn Out That Way He Didn't Let The Fact Get In The Way Of A Good Story.

Look At The View And You'll Never Be Disappointed.

Trying To Be Perfect May Be Inevitable For People Who Are Smart And Ambitious And Interested In The World And Its Good Opinion...what Is Really Hard, And Really Amazing, Is Giving Up On Being Perfect And Beginning The Work Of Becoming Yourself.

I Think We Now Know The Limits Also Of Intelligence And Rhetoric.

But Never Fear, Gentlemen; Castration Was Really Not The Point Of Feminism, And We Women Are Too Busy Eviscerating One Another To Take You On.

You Cannot Be Really First-rate At Your Work If Your Work Is All You Are.

We Don't Do Ambivalence Well In America. We Do Courage Of Our Convictions. We Do Might Makes Right. Ambivalence Is French. Certainty Is American.

I Know That It's Very Dispiriting For People In Their Twenties, Who Expected To Graduate From College, Get Their Own Apartments, Get A Job, And Move Forward With Their Lives, And In Fact Are Still Now Living With Mom And Dad, Which Is Challenging For All Involved.

Consider The Lilies Of The Field. Look At The Fuzz On A Baby's Ear. Read In The Backyard With The Sun On Your Face. Learn To Be Happy. And Think Of Life As A Terminal Illness Because If You Do You Will Live It With Joy And Passion, As It Ought To Be Lived.

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

Here Is One Of The Worst Things About Having Someone You Love Die: It Happens Again Every Single Morning.

Someone You Love

I'm Not Making Light Of Prayers Here, But Of So-called School Prayer, Which Bears As Much Resemblance To Real Spiritual Experienceas That Freeze-dried Astronaut Food Bears To A Nice Standing Rib Roast. From What I Remember Of Praying In School, It Was Almost An Insult To God, A Rote Exercise In Moving Your Mouth While Daydreaming Or Checking Out The Cutest Boy In The Seventh Grade That Was A Far, Far Cry From Soul-searching.

The Gender Gap Looks At This Point Like It's Going To Favor The President, Particularly Among White Suburban Women. I Certainly Think It's Going To Be An Issue. But I Think The Single Most Important Thing In This Election Will Be Turnout.

Maybe Someday It Will Seem Quaint That, During A Time Of Plague, Some Of The Parents Of The 1990s Wanted To Deny Their Children Protection So That They Could Safeguard Their Own Self- Image. Or Maybe We'll Just Seem Like A Bunch Of Lunatics.

The Problem With Freedom Is That You Just Can't Go Back. Once People See What It Means To Be Free People, You Can't Go Back. So They're Going To Keep Nattering On About This And That, And Maybe They'll Make Another Stab At De-funding The Fabulous Planned Parenthood Or Something Of The Sort. To My Mind, It's Just Not Going To Work.

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.

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.

A Man Who Builds His Own Pedestal Had Better Use Strong Cement.

Get A Life In Which You Notice The Smell Of Salt Water Pushing Itself On A Breeze Over The Dunes, A Life In Which You Stop And Watch How A Red-tailed Hawk Circles Over A Pond And A Stand Of Pines. Get A Life In Which You Pay Attention To The Baby As She Scowls With Concentration When She Tried To Pick Up A Cheerio With Her Thumb And First Finger.

There Are A Million Moving Parts To Raising Kids, And You Can't Always Anticipate Them All, Especially When They Are Teenagers And Their Peers Play Such A Huge Role In Their Lives. If You Offer Independence, There Is One Kind Of Pitfall; If You Shelter Them Too Much, There Is Another. And Sometimes You Do Everything Right And Something Bad Just Happens. It's As Simple, And As Scary, As That.

For Most Of My Adult Life, I Have Been An Emotional Hit-and- Run Driver--that Is, A Reporter. I Made People Like Me, Trust Me, Open Their Hearts And Their Minds To Me, And Cry And Bleed On To The Pages Of My Neat Little Notebooks, And Then I Went Back To A Safe Place And Made A Story Out Of It.

You Are The Only Person Alive Who Has Sole Custody Of Your Life ... Your Entire Life ... Not Just The Life Of Your Mind, But The Life Of Your Heart. Not Just Your Bank Account, But Your Soul.

It Often Seems, Looking Back, That The Unexpected Comes To Define Us, The Paths We Didn't See Coming And May Have Wandered Down By Mistake. The Older We Get The More Willing We Are To Follow Those, To Surprise Ourselves.

Speech Is The Voice Of The Heart.

It Would Take A Helluva Man To Replace No Man At All.

And I Don't Have To Listen To A Sermon To Know What To Think Or Feel About Them. It's Almost As If I Absorbed Completely What Mattered Most To Me, And The Rest Could Go.

Sometimes Change Came All At Once, With A Sound Like A Fire Taking Hold Of Dry Wood And Paper, With A Roar That Rose Around You So You Couldn't Hear Yourself Think. And Then, When The Roar Died Down, Even When The Fires Were Damped, Everything Was Different.

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.

You Teach Your 16-year-old With Your Heart In Your Mouth To Be A Good Driver And None Of That Makes Any Difference When Some Drunk Comes Around A Corner And Runs A Stop Sign.

Young Men Kill Someone For A Handful Of Coins, Then Are Remorseless, Even Casual: Hey, Man, Things Happen. And Their Parents Nab The Culprit: It Was The City, The Cops, The System, The Crowd, The Music. Anyone But Him. Anyone But Me.

The Most Sacred Business Of Judges Is Not To Ratify The Will Of The Majority But To Protect The Minority From Its Tyranny.

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.

But While Ignorance Can Make You Insensitive, Familiarity Can Also Numb. Entering The Second Half-century Of An Information Age, Our Cumulative Knowledge Has Changed The Level Of What Appalls, What Stuns, What Shocks.

The Women Of My Mother's Generation Had, In The Main, Only One Decision To Make About Their Lives: Who They Would Marry. From That, So Much Else Followed: Where They Would Live, In What Sort Of Conditions, Whether They Would Be Happy Or Sad Or, So Often, A Bit Of Both. There Were Roles And There Were Rules.

All Things Being Equal, I Would Choose A Woman Over A Man In Order To Even The Balance Of Power, To Insinuate A Different Perspective Into The Process, To Give Young Women Something To Shoot For And Someone To Look Up To. But All Things Are Rarely Equal.

This Is Why I Had Children: To Offer Them A Perfect Dream Of Childhood That Can Fill Their Souls As They Grow Older.

In The Same Way The Brits Had To Get Used To The Idea That The Sun Had Set On The British Empire, I Think That There's The Subrosa Feeling That We Are At The End Of The American Century, And I Think That's Very, Very Hard For Americans To Take.

We're Tortured, A Lot Of Us, Believe Me.

Each Instance Of Sexual Harassment Has To Be Judged On Its Merits. Facts, Timing, Motives, Credibility: All Must Be Considered Before We Make Up Our Own Minds What To Believe.

Uncontrollable Consumerism Has Become A Watchword Of Our Culture Despite Regular And Compelling Calls For Its End. The United States Has More Malls Than High Schools; Americans Spend More Time Shopping Than Reading. ... Some Of The Most Insightful Writing About The American Character Over The Nation's History Has Been About Neither Freedom Nor Democracy But About The Crazed Impulse To Acquire Things.

Jane Austen May Not Be The Best Writer, But She Certainly Writes About The Best People. And By That I Mean People Just Like Me.

The Life Of A Good Dog Is Like The Life Of A Good Person, Only Shorter And More Compressed.

Ignorance Is Death. A Closed Mind Is A Catafalque.

A Safety Net Of Small White Lies Can Be The Bedrock Of A Successful Marriage. You Wouldn't Believe How Cheaply I Can Do A Kitchen Renovation.

I Do Think That People Who Are Now In Their Sixties And Their Seventies Are Living A Different Kind Of Life Than Their Grandparents Led, Even In These Tough Times. A Lot Of Them Are More Active, A Lot Of Them Are Still Working, Which Was Not The Case When Our Grandparents Were In Their Sixties.

We Read In Bed Because Reading Is Halfway Between Life And Dreaming, Our Own Consciousness In Someone Else's Mind.

[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.

A Finished Person Is A Boring Person.

Now The Baby Boomers, I.e., Us, Are Getting Older, And Were Suddenly Discovering That There Are Great Things About Getting Older. You Have Time For Your Friendships And You Appreciate Them In Ways That You Didn't Before.

I Stopped Going To Mass, And Boy, It Was Painful For Me, And It Was Certainly Painful For My Family, But I Just Couldn't Ratify Their Behavior And Their Decisions Anymore By Showing Up On Sundays.

America Is A Country That Seems Forever To Be Toddler Or Teenager, At Those Two Stages Of Human Development Characterized By Conflict Between Autonomy And Security.

I'm Writing This Memoir From The Perspective Of Somebody Who's Prosperous And Has Means. Having Said That, One Of The Things That I Think I Discovered About Those Additional Years Is That I Don't Think They Really Are Added To The End Of Life.

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.

There's Some Muscle Group Around Your Shoulders That Seizes Up During The Perfection Dance And Doesn't Let Go Until You Are Asleep, Or Alone. Or Maybe It Never Really Lets Go At All.

And A Great Misunderstanding Is That Children Think Their Parents Are Grown-up, And Parents Feel Obliged To Act As If They Were.

People Who Wish To Salute The Free And Independent Side Of Their Evolutionary Character Acquire Cats. People Who Wish To Pay Homage To Their Servile And Salivating Roots Own Dogs.

On Social Welfare The Church Does So Much Good Around The World - Nuns Running Schools And Homeless Shelters, Priests Ministering To People Who Are In Crisis.

Writing Seems To Be The Only Profession People Imagine You Can Do By Thinking About Doing It.

The Life You Have Led Doesn't Need To Be The Only Life You Have.

Parents Have Railed Against Shelters Near Schools, But No One Has Made Any Connection Between The Crazed Consumerism Of Our Kids And Their Elders' Cold Unconcern Toward Others. Maybe The Homeless Are Not The Only Ones Who Need To Spend Time In These Places To Thaw Out.

No One Thinks Anything Silly Is Suitable When They Are An Adolescent. Such An Enormous Share Of Their Own Behavior Is Silly That They Lose All Proper Perspective On Silliness, Like A Baker Who Is Nauseated By The Sight Of His Own Eclairs. This Provides Another Good Argument For The Emerging Theory That The Best Use Of Cryogenics Is To Freeze All Human Beings When They Are Between The Ages Of Twelve And Nineteen.

When You Look At The Women That Have Made A Real Difference In The World Throughout History, What They’ve Done Has Almost Always Been Defined By Fearlessness. That’s Something I Came To At A Certain Point; I Wish I’d Come To It Younger. Stop Looking Over Your Shoulder — There’s Nobody Who Matters Back There.

The More Humdrum Aspects Of Life Do Not Make For Gripping Reading. To Render Them Compelling, A Writer Must Describe The Universal In Eloquent And Evocative Prose. Alas, Frey's Writing Suggests That This Was Not An Option, And He Came Up With Something Else.

Your Children Make It Impossible To Regret Your Past. They're Its Finest Fruits. Sometimes The Only Ones.

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.'

[president Johnson] Had The Political Will To Say That Having One In Five Americans Living In The Kind Of Abject Conditions Their Fellow Citizens Associated With Third World Countries And The Novels Of Dickens Was As Dangerous As Any Battlefield Enemy.

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.

I'm Very Optimistic. I Think If You Would Describe Me, My Pretty Consistent Affect Is That I'm A Pretty Happy Person.

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.

It Is So Easy To Waste Our Lives: Our Days, Our Hours, Our Minutes. It Is So Easy To Take For Granted The Pale New Growth On An Evergreen, The Sheen Of The Limestone On Fifth Avenue, The Colour Of Our Kids’ Eyes, The Way The Melody In A Symphony Rises And Falls And Disappears And Rises Again. It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live. Unless You Know There Is A Clock Ticking.

People Always Blame The Girl; She Should Have Said No. A Monosyllable, But Conventional Wisdom Has Always Been That Boys Can't Manage It.

We've Made Hyper Motherhood A Measure Of Female Success.

It Makes Me Angry To Think That . . . Female Sanitation Workers Will Spend Their Days Doing A Job Most Of Their Co-workers Think They Can't Handle, And Then They Will Go Home And Do Another Job Most Of Their Co-workers Don't Want.

The Unemployment Rate Among The Young In The United States Is Still Very Disconcerting, Although We All Know It's Nowhere Near As Bad As It Is In Some Of The European Countries, Where In Some Places It Approaches 50 Percent.

[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.

Knowledge Of Our Own Mortality Is The Greatest Gift God Ever Gives Us.

My Mother Was An Incredibly Loving Mother.

Reading Is Another Thing That Has Made Me More Human By Exposing Me To Worlds I Might Never Have Entered And People I Might Never Meet.

I Don't Know What I Would Do In The World Without [female Friends] For Advice, For Comfort, For Simply Knowing That There Is Someone Out There Who Knows Me As I Am, And Loves Me Despite And Because Of It.

Life Is Made Up Of Moments, Small Pieces Of Glittering Mica In A Long Stretch Of Gray Cement. It Would Be Wonderful If They Came To Us Unsummoned, But Particularly In Lives As Busy As The Ones Most Of Us Lead Now, That Won’t Happen. We Have To Teach Ourselves How To Make Room For Them, To Love Them, And To Live, Really Live.

Whether Talking About Addiction, Taxation [on Cigarettes] Or Education [about Smoking], There Is Always At The Center Of The Conversation An Essential Conundrum: How Come We're Selling This Deadly Stuff Anyway?

When Men Do The Dishes, It's Called Helping. When Women Do The Dishes, It Is Called Life.

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.

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.

If God Is Watching Us, As Some Believers Suggest, As Though We Were A Television Show And God Had A Lot Of Free Time, The Deity Would Surely Be Bemused By How Dumbed-down Devotion Has Sometimes Become In This So-called Modern Era. How Might An Omnipotent Being With The Long View Of History Respond To Those Who Visit The Traveling Exhibit Of A Grilled-cheese Sandwich, Sold On Ebay, That Is Said To Bear The Image Of The Virgin Mary? It Certainly Argues Against Intelligent Design, Or At Least Intelligent Design In Humans.

Cheese Sandwiches

I Was A Kid Who Sometimes Got In Trouble Because I Couldn't Keep My Mouth Shut, Which Turned Out To Be An Advantage When I Became An Opinion Columnist.

The Cairo Conferenceis About A Complicated Web Of Education And Employment, Consumption And Poverty, Development And Health Care. It Is Also About Whether Governments Will Follow Where Women Have So Clearly Led Them, Toward Safe, Simple And Reliable Choices In Family Planning. While Cairo Crackles With Conflict, In The Homes Of The World The Orthodoxies Have Been Duly Heard, And Roundly Ignored.

There Are Those Of Us Who Believe That Under Certain Conditions The Cruelest Thing You Can Do To People You Love Is To Force Them To Live. There Are Those Of Us Who Define Living Not By Whether The Heart Beats And The Lungs Lift But Whether The Spirit Is There, Whether The Music Box Plays.

Stereotypes Fall In The Face Of Humanity. You Toodle Along, Thinking That All Gay Men Wear Leather After Dark And Should Never, Ever Be Permitted Around A Little League Field. And Then One Day Your Best Friend From College, The One Your Kids Adore, Comes Out To You.

Children Should Have Enough Freedom To Be Themselves - Once They've Learned The Rules.

I've Always Had A Certain Facility With Words.

I Think That After A While You Realize That Your Husband Can't Be All Things To You And Certainly You Don't Want The Kids To Be All Things To You, Because That Would Be A Terrible Weight For Them; And That Where You Really Find Solace A Lot Of The Time Is With Your Girlfriends.

I Think The Last Couple Of Years Of Life For Many, Many People Are The Same As They Were 50, 60, 70 Years Ago. They Could Be Really Tough Because Of Infirmity.

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.

[in The Aftermath Of Death] Small Talk Feels Too Small, Big Talk Too Enormous.

Barack Obama Presents As Kind Of A Cool Character, And I Think That That's His Natural Personality.

There Are Obvious Places In Which Government Can Narrow The Chasm Between Haves And Have-nots. One Is The Public Schools, Which Have Been Seen As The Great Leveler, The Authentic Melting Pot. That, Today, Is Nonsense. In His Scathing Study Of The Nation's Public School System Entitled "savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol Made Manifest The Truth: That We Have A System That Discriminates Against The Poor In Everything From Class Size To Curriculum.

My Sister Is A Public School Teacher. She Makes Far Far Less Money Than I Do, And Gets Almost No Public Attention For Her Work. Yet I Believe What She Does Is Infinitely More Important And More Difficult Than What I Do.

Over The Last Twenty Years, We've Changed The World Just Enough To Make It Radically Different, But Not Enough To Make It Work.

The Statue Of Liberty Is Meant To Be Shorthand For A Country So Unlike Its Parts That A Trip From California To Indiana Should Require A Passport.

In A Democratic Society, The Only Treason Is Silence.

... It Was The Idea Of Facing A Future Skimming The Surface Of Life, Winging My Way In And Out Of Other People's Crises, Confusions, And Passages, Engaging Them Enough To Get The Story, But Never Enough To Be Indelibly Touched By What I Had Seen Or Heard.

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.

Don't Ever Confuse The Two, Your Life And Your Work. The Second Is Only Part Of The First.

I Sort Of Feel Like It Comes Around Again. That When You Get To A Certain Age, When You've Lived Enough And You've Got Your Friends To Support You And Your Family To Support You, You Wake Up One Morning And Think, Yeah, I'm Okay.

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.

Those Of Us Who Read Because We Love It More Than Anything, Who Feel About Bookstores The Way Some People Feel About Jewelers.

You Write To Suit Some Sense In Yourself And Trust That That Will Resonate With A Certain Wider Readership.

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.

The Separation Of Church And State Grew Out Of A Desire, Not So Much To Protect Government From Religion, But To Protect Religion From Government.

Don't Ever Forget The Words On A Postcard That My Father Sent Me Last Year: "if You Win The Rat Race, You're Still A Rat.

In Life, The Classroom Is Everywhere. The Exam Comes At The Very End.

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