Kate

“How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed...and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Run over, thought Charlotte. Knocked down by one of those manic cyclists. It dies hard, maternal anxiety. In fact, it doesn’t die at all. A life sentence. Well,”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.”
― Anna Quindlen