Anna Quindlen

Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

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.

A finished person is a boring person.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

Every age has found some alternative to American values appealing. The number of Western intellectuals enamored of fascism and all the various expressions of Marxism was legion.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.