Anna Quindlen Quotes

I was just fascinated with how everyone else in the world lived, and I was interested in telling their story.

Reading changes your perspective and feeds your imagination.

Any educated person recognizes that curiosity and creativity aren't just important; they are among the essential human activities.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

Reading is also a journey. It's a process of discovery.

The joy of reading can take you so many different places. In addition to intelligence and stretching your mind, I just think reading is so crucial in terms of being a well-rounded person.

One of my few virtues - I don't have a lot of them - would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.

I think if people read more, that is a better world.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived.

Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.

The library takes me away from my everyday life and allows me to see other places and learn to understand other people unlike myself.

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

I think that's one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.

Libraries are where we learn that we can live our lives through books.

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination.

My motivation is to get a deeper understanding and exploration of something that I want to know about the human condition. So, that's what I look for in the material I read: if it's asking a genuine question about a concept of the world that interests me. And also, it helps if it's a context that I find interesting.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.