Anna Quindlen Quotes

Life is a journey and it's about growing and changing and coming to terms with who and what you are and loving who and what you are.

I'm at a place in my life right now where I'm very happy, very content. I'm finally OK with the idea of who I love, who I want to be with.

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

Your life is meant for you to understand and process, not to make anyone else happy.

Eventually, we reach the point where we start to realize that we are not going to find peace, contentment, happiness, strength, fearlessness - all of the things that in our heart of hearts we wish we had - outside of us.

It took me several years to figure out who I am and a few more to accept what I discovered. Now, I'm in the enjoyment stage of that process and it's a happy place.

I want to stop transforming and just start being.

When a woman becomes her own best friend life is easier.

I no longer have the fear of being alone. It's cool to find out that you don't need a boyfriend to be happy.

If you want to meet someone who can fix any situation you don't like, who can bring you happiness in spite of what other people say or believe, look in a mirror, then say this magic word: 'Hello.'

We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks.

Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.

Everybody has their story - at some point you have to say, 'This is who I am: Now it's up to me to become what I want to be.'

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

My life has changed. I'm not walking around any more wishing I wasn't me, which was the case at one time.

I have stepped off the relationship scene to come to terms with myself. I have spent most of my adult life being 'someone's girlfriend', and now I am happy being single.

I've learned that the perfect picture that I hold in my mind of what my life looks like is constantly changing, growing, evolving. I remind myself that I am exactly where I need to be in my life; otherwise, I would surely be somewhere else.

There had to be something else out there that would help me change. I wanted to live.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

I think happiness comes from self-acceptance. We all try different things, and we find some comfortable sense of who we are. We look at our parents and learn and grow and move on. We change.

People can hate on you for doing what it is that makes you happy, but ultimately, it has to belong to you. It shouldn't matter what anyone else thinks. Life is not easy. The road to happiness is not a path well trotted. You have to find your own path to enlightenment.

The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

We need to see, and agree that what we seek already lives within us, and we within it. Now we know our one great task: watch for whatever promises us freedom, and then quietly, consciously refuse to see ourselves through the eyes of what we know is incomplete. Then we live wholeness itself, instead of spending our lives looking for it.