Speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning Author, Anna Quindlen

This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen
at the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was
awarded an Honorary PhD.

Worth reading !!

It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.

But a resume is cold comfort on a winter's night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when
you've received your test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume:

I am a good mother to three children.

I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent.

I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe.

I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

I am a good friend to my husband.

I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say.

I am a good friend to my friends and they to me.

Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out.

But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch.

I would be rotten, at best mediocre at my job if those other things were not true.

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

So here's what I wanted to tell you today:

Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house.

Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside,

a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water,

or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone.

Find people you love, and who love you.

And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.

Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter.

Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you
have no business taking it for granted.

Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.

Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity.

Work in a soup kitchen.

Be a big brother or sister.

All of you want to do well.

But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes.

It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again.

It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago.

I learned to love the journey, not the destination.

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

I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly.

And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned.

By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field.

Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear.

Read in the back yard with the sun on your face.

Learn to be happy. 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".

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Thanks to my librarian friend Ms Chin Wey Tze from SPH Library for sharing the speech!


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Here is what I found from "Anna Quindlen" search via Yahoo:

Commencement Address, May 28, 2006

Anna Quindlen's Commencement Speech
Mount Holyoke College
May 23, 1999


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More About Anna Quindlen
Original source of information: Biography of Anna Quindlen
http://www.annaquindlen.com/bio.html

Over the last 30 years, Anna Quindlen's work has appeared in some of America's most influential newspapers, many of its best-known magazines, and on both fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists.

She is a novelist and also writes the prestigious "Last Word" column in Newsweek magazine. Her latest novel, Blessings, is a New York Times bestseller and was recently made into a television movie starring Mary Tyler Moore. Quindlen is currently working on a new collection of essays, Loud and Clear...

A columnist at The New York Times from 1981 to 1994, in 1990 Quindlen became only the third woman in the paper’s history to write a regular column for its influential Op-Ed page when she began the nationally syndicated “Public and Private.”

A collection of those columns, Thinking Out Loud, was published by Random House in 1993 and was on The New York Times Best Seller List for more than three months.

In 1992 Quindlen won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Quindlen joined the Times in 1977 as a general assignment reporter and was named the paper's deputy metropolitan editor in 1983.

She wrote the “About New York” column from 1981 to 1983 and created the column, “Life in the 30’s” in 1985.

In 1995 Quindlen left the world of newspapers, which she had joined as a copy girl at age 18, to become a novelist full-time.

Quindlen has written four bestselling novels:
Object Lessons (1991),
One True Thing (1994),
Black and Blue (1998) and
Blessings (2002).

How Reading Changed My Life was released in September 1998 as was One True Thing, a Universal feature film starring Meryl Streep. Black and Blue, which spent six months on The New York Times Best Seller List, was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, and was made into a television movie.

With the release of A Short Guide To A Happy Life in 2000, Quindlen became the first writer ever to have books appear on the fiction, nonfiction, and self-help New York Times Best Seller lists. The book sold close to a million copies.

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To learn more about Anna Quindlen, follow the links listed below:

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Anna Quindlen

Official Random House web site for author and columnist AnnaQuindlen. Includes biography, appearance schedule, reading group guides, and a book list. www.randomhouse.com/features/aquindlen

Anna Quindlen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anna Marie Quindlen (b. July 8, 1952) is an American author, journalist and opinion columnist whose New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter with The New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Quindlen

Anna Quindlen Quotes - The Quotations Page

I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
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.

www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Anna_Quindlen

Anna Quindlen | Newsweek.com

Newsweek magazine online plus daily news, features and commentary from our global ... and best-selling novelist Anna Quindlen joined Newsweek as a contributing

www.newsweek.com/id/32271


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