ANNA QUINDLEN

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

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.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

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

If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.

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.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

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.

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

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

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?

Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

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

A finished person is a boring person.

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

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

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.