Recently Read: Anna Quindlen Gift Books

If you haven't noticed from posts of Facebook, this blog, and Shelfari, my new favorite author is Anna Quindlen.  After reading all of her fiction, I decided to check out her non-fiction books as well.  I recently read two of her short, "gift" books as I like to call them.  You can sit down a read them front to back in a half hour:) Check them out if you're intrigued by my favorite quotes below.

A Short Guide to a Happy Life

If you win the rat race, you're still the rat.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.  John Lennon

Realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.  Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.

All of us want to do well.  But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes.  It is so easy to exist instead of live.

Our biological clock is a murmur compared to the tolling of mortality.

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.  It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in the lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won't happen.  We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

Being Perfect

Eventually being perfect became like carrying a backpack filled with bricks every single day.

What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect an beginning the work of becoming yourself. More difficult because their is no template to follow, no mask to wear.  Terrifying, actually, because it requires you to set aside what your friends expect, what your family and your co-workers require, to set aside the messages this culture sends about how you should behave.

The president of Duke University commissioned a study on the status of women at the school, the results, released in 2003, were astonishing.  Female undergraduates talked of a culture at the college of "effortless perfection," in which they were expected to be attractive, well-dressed, in great shape, and academically able.  I was mesmerized by that phrase: effortless perfection.  Obviously it is an oxymoron.  Even the illusion of perfection requires an enormous amount of work.

"Perfection irritates as well as it attracts." Louis Auchincloss  But it torments, too, both those who are trying to attain it and those who feel they never can.  The perfect mother (the toughest of all the ideals to imagine) makes other women feel like failures simply by showing up and showing off.

Pursuing perfection makes you unforgiving of the faults of others.

George Eliot wrote, "It is never too late to be what you might have been."  It is never too early, either.