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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.

-Anna Quindlen

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The Unemployment Rate Among

Anna Quindlen

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I'm Going To Live Long Enough To Live In An America That Will Assume Universal Health Care Is A Basic Right. That Will Be Amusing And Terrific.

Reading Has Always Been Life Unwrapped To Me, A Way Of Understanding The World And Understanding Myself Through Both The Unknown And The Everyday. If Being A Parent Consists Often Of Passing Along Chunks Of Ourselves To Unwitting-often Unwilling-recipients, Then Books Are, For Me, One Of The Simplest And Most Sure-fire Ways Of Doing That.

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.

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.

All Of The Qualities That You Need To Be A Good Opinion Columnist Tend To Be Qualities That Aren't Valued In Women.

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.

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.

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

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.

There Is A Lot Of Talk Now About Metal Detectors And Gun Control. Both Are Good Things. But They Are No More A Solution Than Forks And Spoons Are A Solution To World Hunger.

If You Want Something, It Will Elude You. If You Do Not Want Something, You Will Get Ten Of It In The Mail.

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

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.

When Hot Dogs Like Mr. D'amato Or The Republican Apologist Roger Ailes Say That Whitewater Is Worse Than Watergate, It's Because They're Suffering From A Disease. It's Called Bull-imia, And It's The Regurgitation Of Patent Hyperbole.

For Many Years, Despite What I Thought Were Really Punitive Decisions About Women In The Church, I Stayed And Stayed And Stayed. I Kept Saying To Myself, "the Catholic Church Is My Church, And By God, I'm Going To Stay Here, Despite What The Hierarchy Does."

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 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.

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

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.

Not Writing At All Leads To Nothing.

My Home Was In A Pleasant Place Outside Of Philadelphia. But I Really Lived, Truly Lived, Somewhere Else. I Lived Within The Covers Of Books.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

Decorating Consists Mostly Of Building Enough Bookshelves.

Independent Bookstores

Ignorance Is Death. A Closed Mind Is A Catafalque.

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.

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.

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.

It Is This That, Finally, I Will Try To Teach My Sons About Sex, After I've Explained Fertile Periods And Birth Control And All The Other Mechanics That Are Important To Understand But Never Really Go To The Heart Of The Matter: I Believe I Will Say That When You Sleep With Someone You Take Off A Lot More Than Your Clothes.

However, There Will Be A Republican Party Platform That Will Coalesce Around Their Convention. Unless I Miss My Guess, It Will Be Considerably More Conservative On These Issues, Perhaps Even Than Governor Romney Is, And I Think That That Will Give Americans A Clear Set Of Choices About All Issues, But About Women's Issues Too.

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.

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

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.

Jail Sentences Have Many Functions, But One Is Surely To Send A Message About What Our Society Abhors And What It Values. This Week, The Equation Was Twofold: Female Infidelity Twice As Bad As Male Abuse, The Life Of A Woman Half As Valuable As That Of A Man. The Killing Of The Woman Taken In Adultery Has A Long History And Survives Today In Many Cultures. One Of Those Is Our Own.

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

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

So You're Getting Squeezed At Both Sides. You're Taking Care Of Your Mom And Dad And You're Still Doing Caregiving With Your Kids, Which Is Not Easy. But I Think Overall, There's A Level Of Satisfaction That Might Be Unparalleled.

Figuring Out Who You Are Is The Whole Point Of The Human Experience.

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

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

I Do A Lot Of Mental Work Before I Ever Start Writing.

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

By The Time You Kill And Mount What You Catch, It Has Lost That Very Thing That Made It Worth Having. I Knew This Only As A Vague Sense Of Disappointment At Age 10; Not Until Later Did I Recognize It As A Metaphor For Much Of Life.

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.

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.

I'm Just Remembering Myself At 22 Or 23. I Was All Engine And No Steering. (laughter) I Had The Wheels But I Had No Steering. I Do Think It's True That When You're Younger, You're More Likely To Listen To All The Naysayers, And People Are Always Telling You How You Ought To Behave And What Kind Of Job You Should Get And How You Should Look.

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.

Independent Bookstores

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.

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

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

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

If You Want To Write What The World Is About, You Have To Write Details...real Life Is In The Dishes. Real Life Is Pushing Strollers Up The Street, Folding T-shirts, The Alarm Clock Going Off Early And You Dropping Into Bed Exhausted Every Night. That's Real Life.

Keeping Kids Safe Is Sometimes A Delusion. The World Is A Perilous Place. Sometimes The Kitchen Is A Perilous Place.

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

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.

I Am An Affirmative Action Hire.

Affirmative Action

If There Is Anyone Who's Living The Work Of The New Testament, It's The Nuns Of The Catholic Church And Not The Catholic Hierarchy.

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.

Predictions That Unit Cohesion Could Not Survive Honesty About Sexual Orientation Were Simply Wrong. What Does Threaten Morale Arethe Prolonged Investigations, The Questioning Of Friends And Co-workers, The Searches Of Barracks For Magazines And Letters, The Witch Hunts.

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.

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.

My Child Looked At Me And I Looked Back At Him In The Delivery Room, And I Realized That Out Of A Sea Of Infinite Possibilities It Had Come Down To This: A Specific Person, Born On The Hottest Day Of The Year, Conceived On A Christmas Eve, Made By His Father And Me Miraculously From Scratch.

Speech Is The Voice Of The Heart.

London Has The Trick Of Making Its Past, Its Long Indelible Past, Always A Part Of Its Present. And For That Reason It Will Always Have Meaning For The Future, Because Of All It Can Teach About Disaster, Survival, And Redemption. It Is All There In The Streets. It Is All There In The Books.

All Parents Should Be Aware That When They Mock Or Curse Gay People, They May Be Mocking Or Cursing Their Own Child.

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.

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.

I Realized That, While I Would Never Be My Mother Nor Have Her Life, The Lesson She Had Left Me Was That It Was Possible To Love And Care For A Man And Still Have At Your Core A Strength So Great That You Never Even Needed To Put It On Display.

One Of The Things That Got Me On This Topic For This Book Was That When I Was Researching The Column I Wrote In 2009 Saying That I Was Stepping Down From My Column At "newsweek" Because I Wanted To Make Room For Newer, Fresh Voices Out There, I Discovered That In The Year I Was Born, 1952, The Average Life Expectancy Of An American Was 68. I Was Shocked By That Figure And Every Time I Mention It I Hear A Gasp From Somebody In The Crowd. Now, Of Course, We're More Or Less At 80, So That Means That We've Gotten 12 Additional Years.

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

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.

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

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.

Kids And Violent Tv, Violent Tv And Violence, Violence And Kids. The Only People Missing From This Discussion Are The Parents. Where Are We? Gone. Abdicated.

When You Really Want To Say No, Say No. You Can't Do Everything - Or At Least Not Well.

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.

God Bless The Physician Who Warms The Speculum Or Holds Your Hand And Looks Into Your Eyes. Perhaps One Subtext Of The Health Caredebate Is A Yen To Be Treated Like A Whole Person, Not Just An Eye, An Ear, A Nose Or A Throat. A Yen To Be Human Again, On The Part Of Patient And Doctor Alike.

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

The One Thing That I Always Got Positive Reinforcement For From Teachers, Who Really Changed My Life, Was The Written Word.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

What Usually Happens Is That When I'm Nearing The End Of One Novel A Vague Idea About What I Want To Do Next Begins To Present Itself To Me In Terms Of Theme. And I Would Say Over About The Next Six To Eight Months, Usually As I'm Out Power Walking In The Morning, Or When I'm Cooking At Night, Or When I'm Driving In The Car, The People Who Might Embody Those Themes Take On A Sharper And Sharper Focus. And There Comes This Sort Of Critical Mass Moment When They Actually Start To Do Things In My Head.

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.

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.

Familiarity Breeds Content.

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.

So Carry Your Courage In An Easily Accessible Place, The Way You Do Your Cellphone Or Your Wallet. You May Still Falter Or Fail, But You Always Know That You Pushed Hard And Aimed High. Take A Leap Of Faith. Fear Not. Courage Is The Ultimate Career Move.

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

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.

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.

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.

Now, A Lot Of People Are Challenged By The Fact That A Record Number Of People In Their Sixties Have Living Parents, And A Record Number Of People In Their Sixties Have Kids Who May Still Depend Upon Them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If God Had Meant Harvard Professors To Appear In People Magazine, She Wouldn't Have Invented The New York Review Of Books.

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.

The Truth About Your Own Life Is Not Always Easy To Accept, And Sometimes Hasn't Even Occurred To You.

There's No Greater Happiness Than Doing Something Every Day That You Love, That You Feel You Do In A Satisfactory Fashion, And Which Both Supports And Gives You Time To Support Your Family. I Felt So Lucky To Have All That.

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.

I Think That We Really Fool Ourselves About Our Ability To Be Safe And Secure Nowadays.

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

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

If An Opportunity Scares You, That's God's Way Of Saying You Should Jump At It.

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.

If You Raise An Intelligent Girl She Will Become A Feminist Because Of The Facts Of Her Own Life. Raising Feminist Boys Is More Difficult. Raising Egalitarian Boys. One Of The Reasons You Have To Raise Them That Way Is Because It's Better For Them.

Being A Reporter Is As Much A Diagnosis As A Job Description.

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

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.

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.

As I Said, I Had This Fabulous College Education. At College I Met The Man To Whom I've Been Married For 34 Years And Who Is The Father Of Those Three Kids. I Seriously Considered Going To Another College, And My Life Would Have Been Completely Different In Every Way.

When An Actress Takes Off Her Clothes Onscreen But A Nursing Mother Is Told To Leave, What Message Do We Send About The Roles Of Women?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Think Books In Which People Are Really Happy And Things Are Going Well Are Probably The Most Challenging Novels There Are To Write, And There Are Very Few Of Them.

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

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.

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

Fashions In Bigotry Come And Go. The Right Thing Lasts.

I Grew Up In The Suburbs Of Philadelphia And One Of The Things I Like To Say Is That One Of The Biggest Impediments I Had To Becoming A Successful Writer Is I Had A Very Happy Childhood.

It's Important To Remember That Feminism Is No Longer A Group Of Organizations Or Leaders. It's The Expectations That Parents Have For Their Daughters, And Their Sons, Too. It's The Way We Talk About And Treat One Another. It's Who Makes The Money And Who Makes The Compromises And Who Makes Dinner. It's A State Of Mind. It's The Way We Live Now.

New York City Has Finally Hired Women To Pick Up The Garbage, Which Makes Sense To Me, Since, As I've Discovered, A Good Bit Of Being A Woman Consists Of Picking Up Garbage.

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.

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.

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

Someone You Love

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

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

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.

The Age Of Technology Has Both Revived The Use Of Writing And Provided Ever More Reasons For Its Spiritual Solace. Emails Are Letters, After All, More Lasting Than Phone Calls, Even If Many Of Them R 2 Cursory 4 U.

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

She Say Guilt Is A Useless Emotion." "oh, Please," Says Nancy. "guilt Is What Separates Humans From Animals.

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

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.

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?"

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.

The Greatest Public Health Threat For Many American Women Is The Men They Live With.

Guilt Is What Separates Humans From Animals.

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.

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 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.

If I Waited Long Enough And Said, "okay, So What You're Saying Is You Liked Your Life A Lot Better When You Were 30?" Everybody Would Get Real Quiet And Then Admit That That Wasn't The Case, That They Really Felt Like They Were Sort Of Growing Into Themselves In A Way.

Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get.

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.

I Don't Understand How People Learn To Live In The World If They Haven't Had Siblings. Everything I Learned About Negotiation, Territoriality, Coexistence, Dislike, Inbred Differences And Love Despite Knowledge I Learned From My Four Younger Siblings.

Prosecutors Insist They Are Mounting A "thorough Investigation," Which Sometimes Means Thorough And Sometimes, Historically, Has Meant Long Enough To Let The Fire Burn Down In An Incendiary Case. A Thorough Investigation Is Fine; An Interminable One Is Disgraceful.

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.

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

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.

Fifty Years Ago, Teachers Said Their Top Discipline Problems Were Talking, Chewing Gum, Making Noise, And Running In The Halls. The Current List, By Contrast, Sounds Like A Cross Between A Rap Sheet And The Seven Deadly Sins.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wow, So Much Of The Way I've Transacted My Life... So Much Of The Results That I'm Happy About Are Because Of What Daddy Did.

The World Is Full Of Women Blindsided By The Unceasing Demands Of Motherhood, Still Flabbergasted By How A Job Can Be Terrific Andtorturous, Involving And Utterly Tedious, All At The Same Time. The World Is Full Of Women Made To Feel Strange Because What Everyone Assumes Comes Naturally Is So Difficult To Do--never Mind To Do Well.

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.

Maybe Crazy Is Just The Word We Use For Feelings That Will Not Be Contained.

Look Back, To Slavery, To Suffrage, To Integration And One Thing Is Clear. Fashions In Bigotry Come And Go. The Right Thing Lasts.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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