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The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

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
Really
Female
Perfectionism
Beginning
Thyself
Becoming
Empowering
Perfect
Holiday
Hard
Encouragement
Giving
Perfection
Thing
Amazing
Work
Confidence

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
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part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.
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I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.
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There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
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I am an affirmative action hire.
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Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.
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Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.
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Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?
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When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.
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I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.
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It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.
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I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.
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Look at the view and you'll never be disappointed.
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The gender gap looks at this point like it's going to favor the president, particularly among white suburban women. I certainly think it's going to be an issue. But I think the single most important thing in this election will be turnout.
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Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.
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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?
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I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.
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The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.
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knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.
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But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.
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