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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.

-Anna Quindlen

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The Voices Of Conformity

Anna Quindlen

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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.

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

My Most Pronounced Writing Habit Is Trying Not To Write.

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

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.

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.

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 Learned That If I Ever Claim Sexual Harassment, I Will Be Confronted With Every Bozo I Once Dated, Every Women I Once Impressedas Snotty And Superior, And Together They Will Provide A Convenient Excuse To Disbelieve Me.

I Do Tend To Be Almost Kind Of Pollyanna-ish Person.

It's So Much Easier To Write A Resume Than To Craft A Spirit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

So Much Of What You Take For Granted Is The Bedrock Of Happiness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Absence On The Panel Of Anyone Who Could Become Pregnant Accidentally Or Discover Her Salary Was Five Thousand Dollars A Yearless Than That Of Her Male Counterpart Meant There Was A Hole In The Consciousness Of The Committee That Empathy, However Welcome, Could Not Entirely Fill.

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

I Think At Every Moment In The Last Probably 100 Years, When The Institutional Church Had The Opportunity To Do The Right Thing, They Did The Wrong Thing. They're A Dying Institution In Many Parts Of The World Because They Refuse To Ordain Women Or Married People. And Now They're A Dying Institution Because Some Of Their Members Did Enormous Harm To Young People And Instead Of Responding Aggressively With Humility, And With Love, And With The Confession Of Wrongdoing, They Tried To Spin It As Though They Were A Political Party, And That's Just Deplorable.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

That Is Supposed To Be The Rallying Cry Of Women In The Age Of Aids: No Condom, No Sex. But The Dirty Little Secret Is That The Rallying Cry Is A Whisper.... The Great Unspoken On The Heterosexual Aids Front Has Been How Behavior Is Still Determined By The Old Psychosexual Minuet Of The Sexes, The Lack Of Responsibility In Young Men And Of Assertiveness In Young Women.

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?"

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.

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."

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.

My Mother Was An Incredibly Loving Mother.

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.

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

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

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.

Ignorance Is Death. A Closed Mind Is A Catafalque.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Always Have Music On Unless I'm Reading Aloud, Which I Always Do Before I Hand Anything In. It's The Only Way To Know If A Sentence Really Works, Without Clunks Or Cul-de-sac Clauses.

I'm A Catholic Of The New Testament, I'm Not A Catholic Of The Hierarchy.

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.

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.

There Is A Little Boy Inside The Man Who Is My Brother... Oh, How I Hated That Little Boy. And How I Love Him Too.

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'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.

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

Maybe I Had Three Children In The First Place So I Wouldn't Ever Have To Play Board Games. In My Religion, Martyrs Die.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

In A Democratic Society, The Only Treason Is Silence.

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

Sometimes I Remind Myself That I Almost Skipped The Party, That I Almost Went To A Different College, That The Whim Of A Minute Could Have Changed Everything And Everyone. Our Lives, So Settled, So Specific, Are Built On Happenstance.

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.

You Realize That These Accidental Decisions You Make About Changing Jobs, About Moving Into An Apartment Where You Make New Friends And Confidants, About Going To One City Over Another, That Sometimes They're Completely Arbitrary Decisions That You Haven't Put As Much Thought Into As Perhaps You Should Have, And Yet They Change The Course Of Your Whole Life.

Decisions You Make

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?

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 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.

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.

Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get.

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 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.

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.

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.

Raising A Child Is A Little Like Picasso's Work; In The Beginning He Did Very Conventional Representational Things. Cubism Came After He Had The Rules Down Pat.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 Feel About Exercise The Same Way That I Feel About A Few Other Things: That There Is Nothing Wrong With It If It Is Done In Private By Consenting Adults.

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

All Of Us Want To Do Well. But If We Do Not Do Good, Too, Then Doing Well Will Never Be Enough.

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

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.

The Church Does An Enormous Amount Of Good, And It Carries One Of The Most Valuable Messages Imaginable - That You Should Love Your Neighbor As Yourself, And That If You Have Two Coats You Should Give One To The Man Who Has None.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You Realize That Especially When You're Writing A Book Like This, Looking Back On Your Life, That There's Just Such A Depth Of Understanding You Acquire Over Time With The Help Of The People Who Love You That That's When You Can Really Get Down To What You Really Think And Believe.

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.

Downtime Is Where We Become Ourselves, Looking Into The Middle Distance, Kicking At The Curb, Lying On The Grass Or Sitting On The Stoop And Staring At The Tedious Blue Of The Summer Sky. I Don't Believe You Can Write Poetry, Or Compose Music, Or Become An Actor Without Downtime, And Plenty Of It, A Hiatus That Passes For Boredom But Is Really The Quiet Moving Of The Wheels Inside That Fuel Creativity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Sure Smokers Have Made Personal Choices. And They Pay For Those Choices Every Day, Whether Sitting Through An Airline Flight Dyingfor A Smoke, Or Dying For A Smoke In The Oncology Wing Of A Hospital. The Tobacco Companies Have Not Paid Nearly Enough For The Killing.

We Almost Manage To Forget That Things Happen That We Don't Anticipate.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A Life Of Unremitting Caution, Without The Carefree - Or Even, Occasionally, The Careless - May Turn Out To Be Half A Life.

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.'

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

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.

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.

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?

Ever Since The Evil Empire Turned Out To Be A Collection Of Third-world Countries, Americans Aligned On The Far Right Have Tried To Cast Gay Men And Lesbians As The New Enemy, Calculating Deviants Seducing The Nation's Young, Anti-avon Ladies Selling Sodomy Door-to-door. This Simply Won't Wash. Just As Seeing The Russians Up Close And Personal On Television Humanized Them, So Seeing The Lesbian Grandmother Of Two Little Girls Wearing Her Gold Medal With Pride Makes The Notion Of Otherness, Much Less Deviance, Silly And Ignorant.

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.

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

All Of Life Like A Series Of Tableaux, And In The Living We Missed So Much, Hid So Much, Left So Much Undone And Unsaid.

Catastrophe Is Numerical. Loss Is Singular, One Beloved At A Time.

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?

Decorating Consists Mostly Of Building Enough Bookshelves.

Independent Bookstores

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 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.

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

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.

That's Really What I Want In A Leader; I Want Somebody Who's Really, Really Smart.

Anyone Who Has Breast-fed Knows Two Things For Sure: The Baby Wants To Be Fed At The Most Inopportune Times, In The Most Inopportune Places, And The Baby Will Prevail.... And So The Baby Should, And The Mom, Too. Sometimes A Breast Is A Sexual Object, And Sometimes It's A Food Delivery System, And One Need Not Preclude Nor Color The Other.

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.

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

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.

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.

When I Write A Novel, I Have What I Think Of As An Icon That Helps Get Me Into The World Of The Book.

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.

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.

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.

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

I Think What Saved Me, As A Writer, Is That There Are Really Two Breaking Points In My Life. One Was When I Was 19 And My Mother Died, And One Was When I Was 31 And My First Child Was Born. And That Sort Of Gave Me A Kind Of Rebirth That I Think Has Been Invaluable To Me As A Novelist, In Terms Of Seeing The World Anew.

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.

[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.

I Do Not Like Football, Which I Think Of As A Game In Which Two Tractors Approach Each Other From Opposite Directions And Collide. Besides, I Have Contempt For A Game In Which Players Have To Wear So Much Equipment. Men Play Basketball In Their Underwear, Which Seems Just Right To Me.

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.

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

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 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.

Americans Like Warm Characters. It's Why, No Matter What He Did In The Early Days, They Kind Of Resonated To Bill Clinton Because He Seems Like A Guy That You Could Sit Down And Have A Burger And A Beer With. It's Even Why, Despite The Fact That He Sometimes Seemed To Be Not Firing On All Cylinders, Lots Of Them Still Like George W. Bush - Because He Seemed Like The Kind Of Guy You Could Have A Burger And A Beer With.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

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

You Just Can't Tell Or Calibrate Motive Or Intelligence Or Sense. So I Don't Read Anything Unless Someone Tells Me That It's Really Smart Or Illuminating. I Don't Read Any Reviews Anymore And It's Been Really Liberating.

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.

In Books I Have Traveled, Not Only To Other Worlds But Into My Own. I Learned Who I Was And Who I Wanted To Be, What I Might Aspire To, And What I Might Dare To Dream About My World And Myself.

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 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.

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.

Having Children Can Smooth The Relationship, Too. Mother And Daughter Are Now Equals. That Is Hard To Imagine, Even Harder To Accept, For Among Other Things, It Means Realizing That Your Own Mother Felt This Way, Too--unsure Of Herself, Weak In The Knees, Terrified About What In The World To Do With You. It Means Accepting That She Was Tired, Inept, Sometimes Stupid; That She, Too, Sat In The Dark At 2:00 A.m. With A Child Shrieking Across The Hall And No Clue To The Child's Trouble.

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.

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 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.

A Finished Person Is A Boring Person.

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

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.

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.

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

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