Anna Quindlen - A Short Guide to a Happy Life (2000)

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I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.

Anna Quindlen
Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat."

Anna Quindlen
You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

Anna Quindlen
It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

Anna Quindlen
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work.

Anna Quindlen
I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

Anna Quindlen
Knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

Anna Quindlen
And think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

Anna Quindlen
Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won't happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

Anna Quindlen
All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

Anna Quindlen
You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life... Your entire life... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

Anna Quindlen
Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.

Anna Quindlen
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tried to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Anna Quindlen
Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.

Anna Quindlen