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

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

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.
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
It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.
Anna Quindlen
Image
knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.
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
People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.
Anna Quindlen
Image
We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.
Anna Quindlen
Image
It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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
Image
I learned that if I ever claim sexual harassment, I will be confronted with every bozo I once dated, every women I once impressedas snotty and superior, and together they will provide a convenient excuse to disbelieve me.
Anna Quindlen
Image
So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The problem with freedom is that you just can't go back. Once people see what it means to be free people, you can't go back. So they're going to keep nattering on about this and that, and maybe they'll make another stab at de-funding the fabulous Planned Parenthood or something of the sort. To my mind, it's just not going to work.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I've always had a certain facility with words.
Anna Quindlen
Image
There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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
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
Image
I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.
Anna Quindlen
Image
So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you always know that you pushed hard and aimed high. Take a leap of faith. Fear not. Courage is the ultimate career move.
Anna Quindlen