Famous Anna Quindlen Quotations

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"A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement."
by Anna Quindlen
"If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all."
by Anna Quindlen
"In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat."
by Anna Quindlen
"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."
by Anna Quindlen
"The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous."
by Anna Quindlen
"Women are the glue that hold our day-to-day world together."
by Anna Quindlen
"You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are."
by Anna Quindlen
"A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, luminous pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell."
by Anna Quindlen
"Actually being married seemed so crowded with unspoken rules and odd secrets and unfathomable responsibilities that it had no more occurred to..."
by Anna Quindlen
"For weeks or months they moved through their separate lives and slept side by side as though they were two strangers who had mistakenly been a..."
by Anna Quindlen
"February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two month..."
by Anna Quindlen
"Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more th..."
by Anna Quindlen
"I feel about exercise the same way that I feel about a few other things: that there is nothing wrong with it if it is done in private by conse..."
by Anna Quindlen
"I am aghast to find myself in such a position of power over two other people. Their father and I have them in thrall simply by having produced..."
by Anna Quindlen
"If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail."
by Anna Quindlen
"It's babe feminism—we're young, we're fun, we do what we want in bed—and it has a shorter shelf life than the feminism of sisterhood. I've..."
by Anna Quindlen
"It must be terrible to bury someone you love in early May, when the ground is beginning to thaw and stretch and turn bright green and the smel..."
by Anna Quindlen
"Judge Ginsburg's selection should be a model—chosen on merit and not ideology, despite some naysaying, with little advance publicity. Her tr..."
by Anna Quindlen
"Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory."
by Anna Quindlen
"Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle."
by Anna Quindlen
"The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes hap..."
by Anna Quindlen
"The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible—that is, that one is male and the other fem..."
by Anna Quindlen
"There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen..."
by Anna Quindlen
"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 a..."
by Anna Quindlen
"This is what no one warns you about, when you decide to have children. There is so much written about the cost and the changes in your way of ..."
by Anna Quindlen
"When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffe..."
by Anna Quindlen
"Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his teleph..."
by Anna Quindlen
"A finished person is a boring person."
by Anna Quindlen


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