Quote

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

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
Work
Really
Rate
Design
Inspirational
Cannot
Firsts
First

More quotes by 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
By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10 not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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
Image
I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.
Anna Quindlen
Image
If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.
Anna Quindlen
Image
If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
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
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tried to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.
Anna Quindlen
Image
We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.
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
The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Guilt is what separates humans from animals.
Anna Quindlen
Image
That's really what I want in a leader I want somebody who's really, really smart.
Anna Quindlen
Image
It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I've explained fertile periods and birth control and all the other mechanics that are important to understand but never really go to the heart of the matter: I believe I will say that when you sleep with someone you take off a lot more than your clothes.
Anna Quindlen
Image
We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
Anna Quindlen
Image
What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.
Anna Quindlen
Image
My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I've always had a certain facility with words.
Anna Quindlen