Quote

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

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
Words
Rats
Father
Sent
Stills
Winning
Still
Year
Ever
Race
Years
Forget
Lasts
Postcard
Last
Postcards

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
My sister is a public school teacher. She makes far far less money than I do, and gets almost no public attention for her work. Yet I believe what she does is infinitely more important and more difficult than what I do.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.
Anna Quindlen
Image
an the president bring out the voters who were so enthusiastic about him in 2008 and seem a little disenchanted now? Can he bring out young people? Can he bring out Latinos? Can he bring out those white suburban moms?
Anna Quindlen
Image
My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room, and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person, born on the hottest day of the year, conceived on a Christmas Eve, made by his father and me miraculously from scratch.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.
Anna Quindlen
Image
All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
Anna Quindlen
Image
A finished person is a boring person.
Anna Quindlen
Image
being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Anna Quindlen
Image
There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
Anna Quindlen
Image
With reference to the younger generation...If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane.
Anna Quindlen
Image
People always blame the girl she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
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
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.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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
Image
I learned that if I ever claim sexual harassment, I will be confronted with every bozo I once dated, every women I once impressedas snotty and superior, and together they will provide a convenient excuse to disbelieve me.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
Anna Quindlen