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

More quotes by 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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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
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I think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.
Anna Quindlen
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Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.
Anna Quindlen
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After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'
Anna Quindlen
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Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.
Anna Quindlen
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You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.
Anna Quindlen
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the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.
Anna Quindlen
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Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.
Anna Quindlen
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Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.
Anna Quindlen
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There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Your kids are launched. You love your work but you understand how to place it in the panorama of the rest of your life. There's this line in the book, and when I wrote it I thought yes, that's it - if you think of life as a job, maybe by the time you get to, say, in my case, 60, you've finally gotten good at it.
Anna Quindlen
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Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
Anna Quindlen
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So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.
Anna Quindlen
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And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.
Anna Quindlen
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And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.
Anna Quindlen
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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
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Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
Anna Quindlen
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Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
Anna Quindlen