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You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

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
Cannot
Firsts
First
Work
Really
Rate
Design
Inspirational

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I was very driven, very focused, very ambitious. I mean, when I look back on myself in my 20s, part of me just cringes.
Anna Quindlen
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Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
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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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Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.
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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.
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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
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Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.
Anna Quindlen
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God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.
Anna Quindlen
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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
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We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
Anna Quindlen
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Speech is the voice of the heart.
Anna Quindlen
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I think Americans suspect, without even being able to articulate it, that we're at the end of the American century that we're at the end of the 100 or 125 or 150 years when we were the undisputed arbiter and leader of the world.
Anna Quindlen
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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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Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.
Anna Quindlen
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Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
Anna Quindlen
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Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.
Anna Quindlen
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Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, she will mention her girlfriends.
Anna Quindlen
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The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.
Anna Quindlen
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The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific andtorturous, involving and utterly tedious, all at the same time. The world is full of women made to feel strange because what everyone assumes comes naturally is so difficult to do--never mind to do well.
Anna Quindlen
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If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.
Anna Quindlen