Anna Quindlen Quotes

It [motherhood] has changed absolutely everything. I mean, it's changed my life. I think I've changed as a human being more since I've had Kai than in any other period in my life...It's such an incredible catalyst for growth. I found myself questioning absolutely everything: how I spend my time, how I speak, what kind of projects I work on, how I look at the world.

I love being a mom. And I think what I love the most is the way it makes me think about what's important and what's not important. What to fight for and what to just be cool with. What it is that I'm teaching through example and what it is that I was taught that I don't want to teach.

I think a good mom is an awake mom. At least for me, I've always been a kinder, better person awake than sleep-deprived!

The only thing that I can do is know that I have great confidence in raising children and being a great mother.

I like being a mother. For some people, it's so much work that it can be a burden. But it's not for me, maybe because I had my daughter, Valentina, later on in life, at 41.

Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is withering.

There is no theoretical study of motherhood. You know, before I became a mother, I did play a mother, but I was like - I was more thinking of my own mother. I was doing my mother.

I think I would probably have been a good mother.

I've played a mother before, but it's always been a very young child, which is closer to what I can imagine my own life looking like.

I was a perfect mother.

I took being a mom very seriously.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

Life is only lived full-time by women with children.

I have always loved children. I've been fantasizing about motherhood since I was probably 2 ½. I loved to babysit my cousins, and nieces, you know.

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.

It's [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.

Having children made me go down a road of serious introspection and self-examination. I think it's informed and hopefully enhanced my creativity.

But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.

Definitely being a mom changes your perspective on everything.

I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.

No one knows more about the way you think than you do.

Nobody ever told you that being a mother is all about making what seemed like thousands of tiny decisions.

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.