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After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Women
Healing
Enough
Hearing
Smart
Years
Pretty
Almost
Womanhood
Morning
Woke
Woman
Overnight
Thought
Thin

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
Anna Quindlen
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There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.
Anna Quindlen
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The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
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[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
Anna Quindlen
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A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
Anna Quindlen
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I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.
Anna Quindlen
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If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.
Anna Quindlen
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I was a kid who sometimes got in trouble because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, which turned out to be an advantage when I became an opinion columnist.
Anna Quindlen
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Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
Anna Quindlen
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America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
Anna Quindlen
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I learned that if I ever claim sexual harassment, I will be confronted with every bozo I once dated, every women I once impressedas snotty and superior, and together they will provide a convenient excuse to disbelieve me.
Anna Quindlen
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Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.
Anna Quindlen
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I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.
Anna Quindlen
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There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
Anna Quindlen
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I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.
Anna Quindlen
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I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?
Anna Quindlen
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All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.
Anna Quindlen
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But never fear, gentlemen castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.
Anna Quindlen
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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 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
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My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.
Anna Quindlen