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Life & Wisdom Quote by Candace Bushnell

"The most important thing to strive for in life is some kind of personal and professional achievement. Not as a man or a woman, but as a person"

About this Quote

Bushnell’s line reads like a corrective to the glossy gender theater she’s best known for chronicling: the idea that being legible as “a woman” (or “a man”) is itself a full-time job. By insisting on achievement “not as a man or a woman, but as a person,” she’s pulling focus away from identity as performance and toward agency as outcome. It’s not a denial of gender so much as a refusal to let gender be the only plot.

The intent is aspirational, but the subtext is defensive in a familiar late-20th-century way: if the world insists on sorting your ambitions into gendered boxes, you can try to outflank the sorting by claiming a more universal category. That move has bite coming from Bushnell, whose work turned the private negotiations of sex, status, and money into public conversation. She’s speaking from a culture that often treats women’s professional striving as either suspect (“cold,” “unfeminine”) or quaint (“having it all”), while men’s striving gets to remain unmarked.

What makes the line work is its pivot from identity to achievement without pretending the identity pressures don’t exist. “Personal and professional” suggests a life where success is not just a resume but a self, yet she avoids the empowerment-poster mush by naming the real enemy: being reduced. It’s a compact manifesto for refusing to be a demographic first and a human second, even when the market, the workplace, and the dating pool keep demanding your category.

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APA Style (7th ed.)
Bushnell, Candace. (2026, January 17). The most important thing to strive for in life is some kind of personal and professional achievement. Not as a man or a woman, but as a person. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-most-important-thing-to-strive-for-in-life-is-45699/

Chicago Style
Bushnell, Candace. "The most important thing to strive for in life is some kind of personal and professional achievement. Not as a man or a woman, but as a person." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-most-important-thing-to-strive-for-in-life-is-45699/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The most important thing to strive for in life is some kind of personal and professional achievement. Not as a man or a woman, but as a person." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-most-important-thing-to-strive-for-in-life-is-45699/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2026.

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Candace Bushnell (born December 1, 1959) is a Writer from USA.

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