“Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it’s a better subject for a comic novel than a column…. On one coast the cops are busting sex workers on Eighth Avenue, dragging them downtown to night court where they pay the fine and go right back to their corner; on another they’re charging Heidi Fleiss with pandering in a town in which the verb is an art form.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Hypocrisy
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“I haven’t seen so much tippy-toeing around since the last time I went to the ballet. When members of the arts community were asked this week about one of their biggest benefactors, Philip Morris, and its requests that they lobby the New York City Council on the company’s behalf, the pas de deux of self- justification was so painstakingly choreographed that it constituted a performance all by itself.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Hypocrisy
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“I learned that if I ever claim sexual harassment, I will be confronted with every bozo I once dated, every women I once impressed as snotty and superior, and together they will provide a convenient excuse to disbelieve me.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Prejudice
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“The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a year less than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Prejudice
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“I would like to say that I became a feminist to make the world better for women everywhere, but in truth it was to make the world better for me…. Nor was I struck by the rank injustice of sex discrimination. It just seemed like men got all the good stuff.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Prejudice
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“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
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Prejudice
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“In fact what America expects of its citizens and what the Catholic Church expects of the faithful are sometimes so different that they lead to an enormous ker-KLUNK between democracy and theology.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I’ve explained fertile periods and birth control and all the other mechanics that are important to understand but never really go to the heart of the matter: I believe I will say that when you sleep with someone you take off a lot more than your clothes.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“When you grow up you realize that there isn’t really any Santa but the monsters are still around. If only they were big and hairy;now they’re just dark and amorphous, and they’re no longer afraid of the light. Sometimes they’re the guy who climbs in the window and takes your television. And sometimes they’re the guy who walks out the front door with your heart in his hand and never comes back. And sometimes they’re the job or the bank or the wife or the boss or just that sort of dark heavy feeling that sits between your shoulder blades like a backpack. There are always terrible things waiting to grab you by the ankle, to pull you under, to get you with their long horrible arms. And you lie in bed and look at the shadows on the ceiling and feel, under the covers, just for a moment, like you’re safe. One more day alive.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Fear
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“Now I know that much of parenthood is watching and waiting for the chick to fall into harm’s way, watching and waiting for the cats and the cold nights. The joyous enterprise has an undercurrent of terror.”
Anna Quindlen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Fear
