Quote

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

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
Turns
Choose
Whatever
Room
Keep
Parents
Always
Rooms
Life
Turn
Lifeboat
Takes
Lifeboats
Parent
Afloat
Literature
Boat

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
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While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.
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I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.
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You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.
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It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.
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[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
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That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.
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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.
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You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.
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Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.
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Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
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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?
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One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word elderly in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print.
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I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.
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Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
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One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
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We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.
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Socialized medicine, some still cry, but it's long been socialized, with those covered paying for those who are underinsured. American medicine is simply socialized badly, penny wise and pound foolish.
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It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women's rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement.
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Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
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