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When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.

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
Times
Nuts
Feels
Voice
Quit
Good
Inspirational
Voices
World
Mother
Quitting
Doe
York
Soul
Terms
Term
Looks
Success
Feel

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.
Anna Quindlen
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That's really what I want in a leader I want somebody who's really, really smart.
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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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
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I'm just remembering myself at 22 or 23. I was all engine and no steering. (Laughter) I had the wheels but I had no steering. I do think it's true that when you're younger, you're more likely to listen to all the naysayers, and people are always telling you how you ought to behave and what kind of job you should get and how you should look.
Anna Quindlen
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Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
Anna Quindlen
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Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.
Anna Quindlen
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the most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.
Anna Quindlen
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A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.
Anna Quindlen
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Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
Anna Quindlen
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It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.
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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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
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The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.
Anna Quindlen
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I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?
Anna Quindlen
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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
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Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
Anna Quindlen
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Predictions that unit cohesion could not survive honesty about sexual orientation were simply wrong. What does threaten morale arethe prolonged investigations, the questioning of friends and co-workers, the searches of barracks for magazines and letters, the witch hunts.
Anna Quindlen
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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