Anna Quindlen Quotes

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

Before tomorrow, make a list of your traits. Make YOUR list - who you are and why. Then ask yourself this question: where did it come from? Are you the way you are because it is what you want... or what they want? Are you a product of your imagination or someone else's? Think about it.

I think you're always policing yourself by trying to do what you think would be "cool" and accepted by other people, until you start to figure out who you really want to be. Growing up is an ongoing push-and-pull of you being yourself and you performing to what society expects you to be.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

I'm always trying to figure out what my taste is, what my likes and dislikes are.

I'm really not sure what people think or expect me to be, but I am surprised when people say, 'You're not supposed to be like that... ' I'm not exactly sure what 'that' is, so I choose to take it as a compliment.

I think there's a lot of pressure on young people to really be the thing that everyone is telling them that they are, opposed to discovering it for themselves.

I think that as a young lady, you start off not knowing what you want to do, and then you kinda arrive at yourself by the time you're 17 or 18, hopefully. And that's what I did.

When I was 19 or 20 and doing my thing, I can't sit here and say I had this strong political agenda - I was literally just being myself.

I change my style maybe every month. I'm, like, punk one month, ghetto fab the next, classy the next. I'm just young and finding out who I am.

My identity will always inform my experience and shape my perception. But I am an unremarkable person.

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

Getting to a place where I am comfortable saying things was hard-earned for me. I've chewed on the ground glass of my own experience. I saw Gloria Steinem speak, and I was just like, Shut the front door. She was saying that she didn't come into her own until her 40s, and she was asking herself the question, Why should she have to get married? And I just thank God someone asked that question, right? I think we're the first generation of women asking ourselves certain questions and deciding for ourselves.

Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and Responsibility of our existence.

I know as actors our job is usually to shed our skins, but I think as people our job is to become who we really are and so I would like to salute the men and women who brave ostracism, alienation and a life lived on the margins to become who they really are.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

We think we need to create ourselves, always doing a paste-up job on our personalities. That is because we're trying to be special rather than real. We're pathetically trying to conform with all the other people trying to do the same.

It's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism. This can be tricky at times, I suppose, but then so can the tango - particularly if you're dancing alone.

I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are.

I think when you're 25 you're still finding yourself, and you should have the freedom of that.

Living alone, you can do so many fantastic things I've learned. You can like, walk around and have so many conversations with yourself and sing your thoughts. I think I'm the only one that does that.

No book can teach you about yourself, no psychologist, none of the professors or philosophers. What they can teach you is what they think you are or what they think you should be.

You should have the opportunity to be more than one person with different people because you have that within you. It's not like you're faking it. If everyone knows you so well and can always get a hold of you, then you're stuck to this thing that people think you are. You should have the opportunity to reinvent yourself. Because you do. Naturally.

The years between leaving school and actually becoming an adult are very important years. You make a lot of choices as to the type of life you want to lead and what type of person you want to be. There were so many people who had opinions of me, a lot of them very unflattering, that it was hard to make up my mind about who I was supposed to be.