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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.

-Anna Quindlen

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I Wondered Why I

Anna Quindlen

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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.

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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.

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For Most Of My Life The Only Ceremonies I've Been To At Which Women Were The Stars Were Weddings. So I Like Weddings.

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.

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

My Most Pronounced Writing Habit Is Trying Not To Write.

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.

Being A Parent Is Not Transaction ... We Do Not Get What We Give. It Is The Ultimate Pay-it-forward Endeavor: We Are Good Parents Not So They Will Be Loving Enough To Stay With Us But So They Will Be Strong Enough To Leave Us.

Some Of The Most Important Lessons I've Learned Have Been From Stumbling, And I Am Deeply Grateful That My Parents Allowed Me To Fight My Own Battles.

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.

The Pursuit Of Otherness, The Sense That We Are Somehow Different Than Our Brothers And Sisters, No Matter Where We Find Them, Allows For All The Other Great Evils: Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Violence Against Gay People And Against Women.

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.

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.

Life Is Not So Much About Beginnings And Endings As It Is About Going On And On And On. It Is About Muddling Through The Middle.

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.

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

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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.

If We Really Feel Like We're Comfortable In Our Own Skins Now, We Have A Longer Period Of Time To Live Out That Kind Of Third Or Fourth Act Of Our Life.

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.

It Is So Easy To Waste Our Lives: Our Days, Our Hours, Our Minutes ... It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live.

The Purse Is The Mirror Of The Soul.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All Reading Is Good Reading. And All Reading Of Jane Austen And Charles Dickens Is Sublime Reading.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

My Father Really, Really Pushed Me To Excel In A Way That I Resented For Years And Then Realized Had Really Worked For Me.

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.

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.

There Is Something So Settled And Stodgy About Turning A Great Romance Into Next Of Kin On An Emergency Room Form, And Something So Soothing And Special, Too.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

You're Like A Cake When You're Young. You Can't Rush It Or It Will Fall, Or Just Turn Out Wrong. Rising Takes Patience, And Heat.

New York Is A City Where It's Particularly Hard To Be Poor, Not Only Because Everything Costs Twice As Much As It Does Elsewhere But Because Over-the-top Affluence Is Part Of Its Identity.

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

There Is Little Premium In Poetry In A World That Thinks Of Pound And Whitman As A Weight And A Sampler, Not An Ezra, A Walt, A Thing Of Beauty, A Joy Forever.

Socialized Medicine, Some Still Cry, But It's Long Been Socialized, With Those Covered Paying For Those Who Are Underinsured. American Medicine Is Simply Socialized Badly, Penny Wise And Pound Foolish.

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

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

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

Our Love Of Lockstep Is Our Greatest Curse, The Source Of All That Bedevils Us. It Is The Source Of Homophobia, Xenophobia, Racism, Sexism, Terrorism, Bigotry Of Every Variety And Hue, Because It Tells Us There Is One Right Way To Do Things, To Look, To Behave, To Feel, When The Only Right Way Is To Feel Your Heart Hammering Inside You And To Listen To What Its Timpani Is Saying.

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.

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.

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.

When I'm Falling, My Girlfriends Are My Soft Landing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ignorance Is Death. A Closed Mind Is A Catafalque.

There's Something Undeniable About The Posture Of A Person Trying Not To Acknowledge Your Existance

I Think I'm Like Most Novelists In That My Books Have Gotten Farther And Farther Away From Autobiography The Longer I've Been Writing Them.

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.

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.

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 I Quit The New York Times To Be A Fulltime Mother, The Voices Of The World Said I Was Nuts....but If Success Is Not On Your Own Terms, If It Looks Good To The World But Does Not Feel Good In Your Soul, It Is Not Success At All.

An The President Bring Out The Voters Who Were So Enthusiastic About Him In 2008 And Seem A Little Disenchanted Now? Can He Bring Out Young People? Can He Bring Out Latinos? Can He Bring Out Those White Suburban Moms?

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.

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.

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

The Difference Between Government And Leadership Is That Leadership Has A Soul.

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.

The Voices Of Conformity Speak So Loudly. Don't Listen To Them. No One Does The Right Thing Out Of Fear. If You Ever Utter The Words, 'we've Always Done It That Way,' I Urge You To Wash Out Your Mouth With Soap.

I Am A Good Friend To My Husband. I Have Tried To Make My Marriage Vows Mean What They Say. I Show Up. I Listen. I Try To Laugh.

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.

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.

I Don't Do Research For My Novels. Obviously, In My Other Line Of Work As A Reporter And A Columnist, I've Had The Opportunity To Get To Know Both Social Workers And Tv Talk-show Hosts.

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.

My Mother Was An Incredibly Loving Mother.

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.

I Do Think There's Some Aspect Of Being A Novelist That Is A Little Crazy Making.

I've Been A Feminist Since I Was A Teenager, But Originally It Was Because I Wanted To Make The World A Better Place For Me.

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.

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.

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?

Grief Remains One Of The Few Things That Has The Power To Silence Us.

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.

Acts Of Bravery Don't Always Take Place On Battlefields. They Can Take Place In Your Heart, When You Have The Courage To Honor Your Character, Your Intellect, Your Inclinations, And Yes, Your Soul By Listening To Its Clean, Clear Voice Of Direction Instead Of Following The Muddied Messages Of A Timid World.

While We Pay Lip Service To The Virtues Of Reading, The Truth Is That There Is Still In Our Culture Something That Suspects Those Who Read Too Much, Whatever Reading Too Much Means, Of Being Lazy, Aimless Dreamers, People Who Need To Grow Up And Come Outside To Where Real Life Is, Who Think Themselves Superior In Their Separateness.

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.

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