The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True friendship allows for honest conversations about the challenges of motherhood.
This quote highlights the profundity of friendship among mothers, emphasizing that authentic connections are formed when individuals can openly share their struggles and vulnerabilities. In the midst of everyday chaos, such as a table covered in spilled juice and art supplies, these candid discussions become a source of comfort and understanding, illustrating the importance of companionship during the challenging journey of mothering.
Themes
MotherhoodFriendshipVulnerabilitySupportTea
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared during a mom's meetup to highlight the importance of support among mothers.
More from Anna Quindlen
All quotes →The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
Anna QuindlenRead
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.
Anna QuindlenRead
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Anna QuindlenRead
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
Anna QuindlenRead
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.
Anna QuindlenRead
Similar quotes
Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
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I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.
E. M. ForsterRead
And let your best be for your friend. If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also. For what is your friend that your should seek with him hours to kill? Seek with him always hours to live. For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness. And in the sweetness of friendship, let there be laughter, and the sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
Khalil GibranRead
... the friendship of worthless people has a bad effect (because they take part, unstable as they are, in worthless pursuits, and actually become bad through each other's influence). But the friendship of the good is good, and increases in goodness because of their association. They seem even to become better men by exercising their friendship and improving each other; for the traits that they admire in each other get transferred to themselves.
AristotleRead
I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For who has sight so keen and strong, That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroke; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowRead
He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, For he knew when he pleas'd he could whistle them back.
Oliver GoldsmithRead