Anna Quindlen

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

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.

When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.

I am an affirmative action hire.

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.

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.

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.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

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.

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.

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?

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.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

A finished person is a boring person.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.