Quote

There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.

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
Dance
Seizes
Groups
Muscle
Alone
Lets
Maybe
Asleep
Doesn
Muscles
Shoulders
Around
Group
Really
Perfection
Never

More quotes by 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
She say guilt is a useless emotion. Oh, please, says Nancy. Guilt is what separates humans from animals.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.
Anna Quindlen
Image
All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self that's why it survives
Anna Quindlen
Image
Acts of bravery don't always take place on battlefields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world.
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
I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen
Image
When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.
Anna Quindlen
Image
You're like a cake when you're young. You can't rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
Anna Quindlen
Image
Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I really feel like if you can get past your fear, if you can say, Uh-uh, I'm afraid to do that and I'm going to do it anyhow, that that's really the way to have a satisfying life moving forward. I think I had that kind of fearlessness even as a young person. It wasn't tempered by experience or wisdom, but it took me a long way.
Anna Quindlen
Image
But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.
Anna Quindlen
Image
On social welfare the Church does so much good around the world - nuns running schools and homeless shelters, priests ministering to people who are in crisis.
Anna Quindlen