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

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
Exist
Instead
Minutes
Days
Hours
Lives
Easy
Live
Waste

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.
Anna Quindlen
Image
We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.
Anna Quindlen
Image
You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
Anna Quindlen
Image
For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
Anna Quindlen
Image
When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women?
Anna Quindlen
Image
A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.
Anna Quindlen
Image
All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
Anna Quindlen
Image
People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father and his brothers and sisters and his mother are all people who would sit around with a Tom Collins and tell stories that seemed to get better and better each time they told them.
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
I know a lot and have written a lot and have thought a lot about motherhood.
Anna Quindlen