Quote

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Persons
Darkness
Verses
Person
Along
Searching
Writing
Steps
Blank
Mind
Wonderful
Walked
Never
Read
Beach
Would
Night
Miles
Endlessly
Life
Someone
Ocean
Crossed
Change
Step
Verse

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.
Anna Quindlen
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Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
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When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.
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For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.
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I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.
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If you raise an intelligent girl she will become a feminist because of the facts of her own life. Raising feminist boys is more difficult. Raising egalitarian boys. One of the reasons you have to raise them that way is because it's better for them.
Anna Quindlen
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I was a kid who sometimes got in trouble because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, which turned out to be an advantage when I became an opinion columnist.
Anna Quindlen
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There's no greater happiness than doing something every day that you love, that you feel you do in a satisfactory fashion, and which both supports and gives you time to support your family. I felt so lucky to have all that.
Anna Quindlen
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Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?
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When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.
Anna Quindlen
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A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.
Anna Quindlen
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Barack Obama presents as kind of a cool character, and I think that that's his natural personality.
Anna Quindlen
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The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna Quindlen
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Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
Anna Quindlen
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You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.
Anna Quindlen
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I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.
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I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.
Anna Quindlen
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I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.
Anna Quindlen
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The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Anna Quindlen
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There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.
Anna Quindlen