Anna Quindlen Quotes

I've been given an amazing opportunity and I could not be more grateful. But I also know that all this will eventually die off. It's not real. It will go away and then you'll go away and then, I don't know, I'll be left sitting in some English hotel room.

We have lived long enough to experience the hollowness of earth and the rottenness of all carnal promises.

Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it.

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

I finally had what I'd wantes all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.

There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.

There was no use pretending, no magic left to hear, all the music gave me was a craving for lite beer.

To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei

It's like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, 'I'm terribly sorry. I'm tired.'

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.

Middle age is when you still believe you'll feel better in the morning.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

He could not play the game without hope; could not play the game without a dream. They had taken it all away from him now, they had turned away from him and there was nothing for him now...He was alone and there was nothing for him.

All the little emptiness of love!

We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

Oh, the cares of men! how much emptiness there is in human concerns!

I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

There's the moon trying to look romanticMoon's too old that's her troubleAren't we all?

I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.

And oft I thought (my fancy was-so strong) That I, at last, a resting-place had found: 'Here: will I dwell,' said I,' my whole life long, Roaming the illimitable waters round; Here will I live, of all but heaven disowned. And end my days upon the peaceful flood - To break my dream the vessel reached its bound; And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

There was nothing, nothing to depend on. And why was I surprised?