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

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.
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Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
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Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
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Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
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I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.
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I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.
Anna Quindlen
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Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
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I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.
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Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.
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I don't understand how people learn to live in the world if they haven't had siblings. Everything I learned about negotiation, territoriality, coexistence, dislike, inbred differences and love despite knowledge I learned from my four younger siblings.
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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.
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I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.
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I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.
Anna Quindlen
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I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything particularly special or wonderful about it, but when you watch somebody hold on to that life with both hands, it makes you think that life must be pretty damn good.
Anna Quindlen
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In the same way the Brits had to get used to the idea that the sun had set on the British Empire, I think that there's the subrosa feeling that we are at the end of the American century, and I think that's very, very hard for Americans to take.
Anna Quindlen
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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
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Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen
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In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.
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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.
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