Quote

My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.

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
Father
Years
Really
Way
Resented
Excel
Pushed
Realized
Worked

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I really feel like if you can get past your fear, if you can say, Uh-uh, I'm afraid to do that and I'm going to do it anyhow, that that's really the way to have a satisfying life moving forward. I think I had that kind of fearlessness even as a young person. It wasn't tempered by experience or wisdom, but it took me a long way.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I got a fortune cookie that said, To remember is to understand. I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.
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
Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The Church does an enormous amount of good, and it carries one of the most valuable messages imaginable - that you should love your neighbor as yourself, and that if you have two coats you should give one to the man who has none.
Anna Quindlen
Image
[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.
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
Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.
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 most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.
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
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Now, a lot of people are challenged by the fact that a record number of people in their sixties have living parents, and a record number of people in their sixties have kids who may still depend upon them.
Anna Quindlen