Anna Quindlen
Anna Quindlen
Anna Marie Quindlenis an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist whose New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth8 July 1952
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
Anna Quindlen quotes about
It is so easty to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes...It is so easy to exist instead of live.
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.
The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.
I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it...why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer.
I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.
And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.
Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
I know that it's very dispiriting for people in their twenties, who expected to graduate from college, get their own apartments, get a job, and move forward with their lives, and in fact are still now living with Mom and Dad, which is challenging for all involved.
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
Acts of bravery don't always take place on battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.
As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.
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.