Anna Quindlen (July 8th, 1952) is an American author, journalist and opinion columnist who won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. Quindlen began her career in journalism in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post and has held several posts with the New York Times.
During her career, Anna Quindlen has written more than a dozen nonfiction works, and the same number of novels and children’s books. A lover of literature, Quindlen has referred to her love of reading, and writing many times within her works, essays, and speeches and today we’re bringing you some of our favourite quotes to mark the day.
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
“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.”
~ Imagined London: A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City
“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.”
“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.”
“Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”
~ [Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]
“How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us?
~ How Reading Changed My Life
“Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.”
“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.”
~ [Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]”
“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.”
~ Imagined London: A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City
“The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That’s how life is most of the time, isn’t it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It’s the getting there that’s challenging.”
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