Anna Quindlen Quotes

I read some books that were the right books for me. I read them and I didn't even notice turning the pages anymore. I thought, "That's what I want to do with my life."

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Books are my very favorite gift to give. If you give a book to someone and they really respond to it, you feel you've actually changed their life in some way.

I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when I was 19, and I still think about the characters.

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

Individuals somehow are led to find my books at times that are important to them. The mail that I get very, very often will say, "I was at a difficult time in my life, and someone gave me a copy."

After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there was an anthology without any names attached to it and I read a poem called Spellbound and I somehow attached it to my grandfather's death and I thought my grandfather had written it.

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive

I think it was simply word of mouth that made it a New York Timesbestseller for more than 60 weeks, over a year. People being moved and changed and transformed by the book [One Thousand Gifts] and wanting to share that with hurting people all around them.

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

The books that have helped me most are the ones I reacted to, not just read

I did not go through the Book. The Book went through me.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn’t want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, “good book,” as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.

Funny the way it is, not right or wrong, somebody's heart is broken, and it becomes your favorite song.

I'm still very affected and moved by their music - maybe in a way that's different from someone who grew up around it.

When I read Jerome D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" that was the first time I felt my mind blow open. I thought that book was speaking to me. I was 12 or 13 when I read that. I read everything on my mother's bookshelves.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

I think it was simply word of mouth that made it a New York Times bestseller for more than 60 weeks, over a year. People being moved and changed and transformed by the book [ One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are] and wanting to share that with hurting people all around them.