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
Back
Look
Looks
Mean
Cringe
Ambitious
Driven
Focused
Part

More quotes by 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
I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.
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
Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.
Anna Quindlen
Image
More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.
Anna Quindlen
Image
A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Speech is the voice of the heart.
Anna Quindlen
Image
When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen
Image
If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.
Anna Quindlen
Image
When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.
Anna Quindlen
Image
But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.
Anna Quindlen
Image
The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.
Anna Quindlen