Quote

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

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
Rhetoric
Intelligence
Limits
Also
Think
Thinking

More quotes by 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
I do get a sense that there's a huge disconnect between the political powers and what's really happening, so right-wing conservatives can talk about contraception all they want, but the women of America are using birth control. It's as simple as that.
Anna Quindlen
Image
February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
Anna Quindlen
Image
It's an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you're a five-year-old, you don't pay any attention to what anyone thinks of you. You just sort of are in your skin.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.
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
Frankly, I'm mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.
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
There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
Anna Quindlen
Image
When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.
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
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
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
So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you always know that you pushed hard and aimed high. Take a leap of faith. Fear not. Courage is the ultimate career move.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.
Anna Quindlen
Image
I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
Anna Quindlen
Image
Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.
Anna Quindlen