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Time Quotes by Anna Quindlen

52 Time quotes by Anna Quindlen

All Time quotes Anna Quindlen’s page

A book can hold all the mysteries of the universe at a single moment. When parents hide protection during a plague, time feels like a secret test of trust. Growing comfortable in our own skin gives us a longer stage for later acts, and each school year can feel like a fresh reinvention.

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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

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Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

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Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.

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Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

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“Sometimes you say a word so many times that it loses its meaning...”

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“I thought I had a handle on my future. But the future, it turns out, is not a tote bag.”

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Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.

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“I'm fine," she said. But her smile was bleak, without light or warmth. And for the first time I thought of what…

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If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out…

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Your hair isn't quite right and maybe you're a size bigger than you should be and on and on and on. I…

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“Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe…

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Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels…

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“When you look back on your life there are always times that you remember as the hard times, even if they're the…

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Now the baby boomers, i.e., us, are getting older, and were suddenly discovering that there are great things about getting older. You…

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“it is the only time I can rest without sleeping, think without deciding, speak and hear my own voice. It is the…

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“Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird…

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London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason…

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The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think…

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“to a surprising conclusion about this moment in our lives. No, it’s not that there are weird freckly spots on the back…

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People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father…

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You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth…

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“There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The…

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Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful…

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“The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the…

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I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right…

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“The biggest mistake I made [as a parent] is the one that most of us make. … I did not live in…

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“One of the most important parts of tending our friendships is working our way, over time, into the kind of friendships that…

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“How many times in the past three months have I been reminded of Ruby's two selves, the careful courteous young woman who…

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“Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The…

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“You make concessions when you're married a long time that you don't believe you'll ever make when you're beginning. You say to…

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Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny…

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I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child,…

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I think there was a long period of time when we got real invested in a youth culture, and not coincidentally it…

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You can get rid of the column. It's a little like staying at a hotel; you get used to the shape of…

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There's no greater happiness than doing something every day that you love, that you feel you do in a satisfactory fashion, and…

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“Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the…

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“My friendships have a certain symmetry at the moment: Alice is always asking me what she should do, and Nancy is always…

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I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in…

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By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I…

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... It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other…

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More by Anna Quindlen

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write,…

Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is…

Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose…

Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some…

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at…

“I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and…

A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.

“In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once,…

“Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I…

I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now.

It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.

Not writing at all leads to nothing.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to…