In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.
Anna Quindlen

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
Anna Quindlen

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.
Anna Quindlen

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
Anna Quindlen

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.
Anna Quindlen

The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female.
Anna Quindlen

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
Anna Quindlen

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
Anna Quindlen

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
Anna Quindlen

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.
Anna Quindlen

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Anna Quindlen

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.
Anna Quindlen

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.
Anna Quindlen

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Anna Quindlen

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
Anna Quindlen

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.
Anna Quindlen

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.
Anna Quindlen