Quote

I was very driven, very focused, very ambitious. I mean, when I look back on myself in my 20s, part of me just cringes.

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
Ambitious
Driven
Focused
Part
Back
Look
Looks
Mean
Cringe

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

Image
Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? Keep her, I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
Image
God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.
Anna Quindlen
Image
My sister is a public school teacher. She makes far far less money than I do, and gets almost no public attention for her work. Yet I believe what she does is infinitely more important and more difficult than what I do.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn't mean I don't still get an enormous kick out of infatuation: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart.
Anna Quindlen
Image
A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.
Anna Quindlen
Image
As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.
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
high fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you're tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.
Anna Quindlen
Image
We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.
Anna Quindlen
Image
America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
Anna Quindlen