Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Lives
Easy
Live
Waste
Exist
Instead
Minutes
Days
Hours
More quotes by Anna Quindlen
Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
Anna Quindlen
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
Anna Quindlen
I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.
Anna Quindlen
The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.
Anna Quindlen
That's really what I want in a leader I want somebody who's really, really smart.
Anna Quindlen
I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
Anna Quindlen
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
I know a lot and have written a lot and have thought a lot about motherhood.
Anna Quindlen
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
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.
Anna Quindlen
A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
Anna Quindlen
the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
Anna Quindlen
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
It's an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you're a five-year-old, you don't pay any attention to what anyone thinks of you. You just sort of are in your skin.
Anna Quindlen
Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.
Anna Quindlen
I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.
Anna Quindlen
Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.
Anna Quindlen
Familiarity breeds content.
Anna Quindlen
You can get rid of the column. It's a little like staying at a hotel you get used to the shape of the room, and then you're gone. With a novel you move into town and stay for a long time. That's both comforting and terrifying.
Anna Quindlen
I know that it's very dispiriting for people in their twenties, who expected to graduate from college, get their own apartments, get a job, and move forward with their lives, and in fact are still now living with Mom and Dad, which is challenging for all involved.
Anna Quindlen
