Quote

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

Anna Quindlen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Literature
Pound
Littles
Pounds
Little
Thinks
Thing
Weight
Sampler
Thinking
Poetry
Ezra
World
Joy
Whitman
Beauty
Premium
Forever
Walt

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
Anna Quindlen
Image
In life, the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.
Anna Quindlen
Image
It's an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you're a five-year-old, you don't pay any attention to what anyone thinks of you. You just sort of are in your skin.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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
Image
One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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 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.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.
Anna Quindlen
Image
A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
Anna Quindlen
Image
the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Anyone who has breast-fed knows two things for sure: The baby wants to be fed at the most inopportune times, in the most inopportune places, and the baby will prevail.... And so the baby should, and the mom, too. Sometimes a breast is a sexual object, and sometimes it's a food delivery system, and one need not preclude nor color the other.
Anna Quindlen
Image
My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Not writing at all leads to nothing.
Anna Quindlen
Image
All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.
Anna Quindlen
Image
A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
Anna Quindlen
Image
knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.
Anna Quindlen