Quote

Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.

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
Life
Straighten
Illusory
Messy
Temptation
Results
Strong
Always

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
Testosterone does not have to be toxic.
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
Prosecutors insist they are mounting a thorough investigation, which sometimes means thorough and sometimes, historically, has meant long enough to let the fire burn down in an incendiary case. A thorough investigation is fine an interminable one is disgraceful.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I do tend to be almost kind of Pollyanna-ish person.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.
Anna Quindlen
Image
London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.
Anna Quindlen
Image
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
Anna Quindlen
Image
There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
Anna Quindlen
Image
When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.
Anna Quindlen
Image
You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I only really understand myself, what I'm really thinking and feelings, when I've talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room.
Anna Quindlen
Image
London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
Image
My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room, and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person, born on the hottest day of the year, conceived on a Christmas Eve, made by his father and me miraculously from scratch.
Anna Quindlen