Anna Quindlen Quotes

Well, I think people don't recognise my face because I'm so much older now, but it is astonishing that people can recognise a voice. I do sometimes get recognised, and indeed a lot of people do come and see me.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

I feel increasingly like age is very irrelevant. Quite often, cynicism is confused with wisdom, and my scorn is confused with a knowing, which I don't have.

It's kind of like when you have guests coming over to your house, and you haven't really picked up in awhile, and you look around and say, 'Wow, my place is kind of a mess, but I never noticed it because it's what I've been living in every day.' That's kind of what Supergirl is to the Red Lanterns.

As we travel around Britain, I am convinced most of us cannot really appreciate what we are seeing. We take too much for granted, because it is all so familiar.

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

Two young salmon are swimming along one day. As they do, they are passed by a wiser, older fish coming the other way. The wiser fish greets the two as he passes, saying, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The other two continue to swim in silence for a little while, until the first one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?"

He is an old glove, but he looked like the old Glove.

Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.

Well isn’t that one thing you’re all the more wise for? Age has taught you something. It seems to me that you know the big secret. That nobody knows what’s going on

People always get used to beauty though.

A man does not wonder at what he sees frequently, even though he be ignorant of the reason. If anything happens which he has not seen before, he calls it a prodigy.

I looked at him like he was an idiot, but he didn’t notice. Or maybe he got it so often, he thought that was how people looked at him.

...in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive." (Mr. Bell)

Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.

How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough.

In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.

We live in an age of miracles so commonplace that it can be difficult to see them as anything other than part of the daily texture of living

To the vulgar eye, few things are wonderful that are not distant

Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance.

Tis well for old age that it is always accompanied with want of perception, ignorance, and a facility of being deceived. For should we see how we are used and would not acquiesce, what would become of us?

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity. A fool is a natural proselyte, but he must be caught young, for his convictions, unlike those of the wise, harden with age.

When we're young, everything is possible; when we're old, possibilities are everything.