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
Realized
Worked
Father
Years
Really
Way
Resented
Excel
Pushed

More quotes by 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
Image
What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I went to a women's college. ... it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool I didn't learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by that time I was one hell of a kicker.
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
When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.
Anna Quindlen
Image
You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.
Anna Quindlen
Image
If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Not writing at all leads to nothing.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.
Anna Quindlen
Image
And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.
Anna Quindlen
Image
That's really what I want in a leader I want somebody who's really, really smart.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
Anna Quindlen
Image
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
Anna Quindlen
Image
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
Image
I think that after a while you realize that your husband can't be all things to you and certainly you don't want the kids to be all things to you, because that would be a terrible weight for them and that where you really find solace a lot of the time is with your girlfriends.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I go online all the time, I just don't read about myself. I read a fashion website called Go Fug Yourself. I actually correspond with the Fug Girls and that's great.
Anna Quindlen
Image
It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.
Anna Quindlen