Anna Quindlen

Une femme sans mari, c'est comme un poisson sans bicyclette.

"Peter est tellement européen", disaient les femmes de son entourage ; par la suite, Rebecca se demanderait si c’était leur façon de lui faire comprendre que Peter avait des aventures.
Mais ça, ce serait plus tard.

Vu de l'extérieur, la chance était une illusion.

A la fin du dîner, la tête lui tournant un peu à cause du vin, elle s'était sentie comme chaque fois qu'elle voyageait : elle appréciait l'attrait de la nouveauté mais aurait préféré la contempler depuis sa maison et dans des vêtements confortables.

Bof,bof,bof .....
Lenteur,longueur,ennui tout au long du livre ....
Sans intérêt !

Ainsi va le monde : des gens décident qu'ils veulent telle ou telle chose puis tentent de vous faire croire que vous le désirez autant qu'eux. (dans le prologue)
Pourtant, elle n'avait commencé à regimber lorsqu'il s'agissait de quitter son domicile que deux ans après avoir aménagé à côté de chez nous.
Dans mon esprit, l'enfance consistait en majeure partie à essayer de comprendre les adultes et de prévoir ce qu'ils allaient faire, puisque toutes leurs actions avaient des répercussions sur moi d'une façon ou d'une autre.(chapitre 6)
Ce qui me manquait le plus que tout, c'était la Mimi que j'avais été. (chapitre 10)
La conception que ma mère avait de la poussière était celle qu'un évangéliste fanatique avait du diable : elle était comme lui partout et à l'origine de tous les mots.(chapitre 13)
En fait, ce que l'on se rappelle, ce sont les petits moments étranges qui vivent en nous et qui passent de temps en temps la tête lorsque des fenêtres s'ouvrent dans notre esprit. (chapitre 21).
Référence en lecture numérique

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world’s great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in the way I once dreamed of traveling as a child. And the irony is that I don’t care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. This is what I like about traveling: the time on airplanes spent reading, solitary, happy. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality […] Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

That’s because people like the thing itself. They don’t eat mashed potatoes with gravy because they just need to be nourished, but because mashed potatoes and gravy are wonderful in so many ways […] And that is the way it is with books. It is not simply that we need information, but that we want to savor it, carry it with us, feel the heft of it under our arm. We like the thing itself.

This ability of a book to lessen isolation is important, not simply for personal growth, but for cultural and societal growth as well. Before the advent of television, books were the primary vehicle for discovering both the mysteries and the essential human similarities of those a world away.

Kafka said “a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Perhaps we women are more willing to break the ice. Two things that made this possible most often in many of our lives were intimate friendships and reading.

This sense of women reading, reading, always reading, was in fact reinforced by what I read […] There are very few books in which male characters, much less boys, are portrayed as devoted readers. Actually, there are far fewer coming-of-age books for boys in general, and most are unabashed action stories: raft rides, pirate ships, and battlefields. By contrast, friendship and reading are the central themes of much of the best-loved literature for girls.
When I was younger, I figured that this was because we women had so little to do in the world that the closest we would ever come to real life was to read about it. In fact, that’s probably why I loved reading so myself; part of my dissatisfaction with my life was clearly, in retrospect, a dissatisfaction with the traditional roles available to me as a girl at the time, neither of which—nun or housewife, take your pick—particularly suited my temperament.
But it may also be true that the psychology of women lends itself to a keen interest in the vicarious experience of life.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.

[…] it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one […] were more real than the real people I knew. My home was in that pleasant place outside Philadelphia, but I really lived somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments. I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. […] There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.

Nos enfants ont encore l’expression d’impatience à peine ternie des jeunes déterminés à tirer le meilleur parti de la nuit glaciale. Après leur départ, la réception perd de sa gaieté. Il ne reste plus qu’une cuisine remplie d’assiettes dont les détritus ont été raclés au-dessus de la poubelle, et plusieurs dizaines d’adultes qui expriment à quel point leur tolérance à l’alcool diminue avec l’âge.

Être intelligent ne signifie pas toujours être intéressant. Être cultivé ne signifie pas toujours être intelligent. Je te le dis par expérience.

Je suis souvent perturbée par la particularité de mes sentiments pour Ruby. Peut-être est-ce parce qu’elle est mon premier enfant, que j’étais si jeune quand elle est née, et que j’ai découvert qui j’étais en apprenant à la connaître. J’ai découvert que je pouvais me passer de sommeil, de stimulant, qu’en me forçant un peu, je pouvais m’améliorer. Je me sentais fière d’avoir survécu à ses coliques, à sa chute du lit, à la fois où ses doigts minuscules s’étaient coincés dans la porte.

Quand les enfants étaient bébés, j’avais coutume, lorsque je les berçais ou les changeais, de leur chanter des chansons dépourvues de sens. Soudain, venue de nulle part, l’une d’elles me revient : « Sain et sauf, sain et sauf, tout alentour est sain et sauf.

Tout le monde sous-estime les jeunes enfants.