Anna Quindlen

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

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'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.

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?

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.

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.

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

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.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

She say guilt is a useless emotion." "Oh, please," says Nancy. "Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

Speech is the voice of the heart.

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

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.

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.

Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.