Quote

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

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
Night
Miles
Endlessly
Would
Someone
Ocean
Crossed
Life
Change
Step
Verse
Persons
Darkness
Verses
Person
Along
Searching
Writing
Steps
Blank
Mind
Wonderful
Walked
Read
Beach
Never

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I don't know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it.
Anna Quindlen
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Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen
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Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.
Anna Quindlen
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I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. Book love, Trollope called it. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you.
Anna Quindlen
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Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.
Anna Quindlen
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Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.
Anna Quindlen
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you.
Anna Quindlen
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Frankly, I'm mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.
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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All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
Anna Quindlen
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I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self that's why it survives
Anna Quindlen
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I'm always keeping an eye on the court. Also, when the members of Congress came to his office during the budget debacle of a year and a half back and said, We want to de-fund Planned Parenthood, he said, Not going to happen. Those apparently were more or less his exact words.
Anna Quindlen
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Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
Anna Quindlen
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An election marks the end of the affair it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur.
Anna Quindlen
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Barack Obama presents as kind of a cool character, and I think that that's his natural personality.
Anna Quindlen
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In the same way the Brits had to get used to the idea that the sun had set on the British Empire, I think that there's the subrosa feeling that we are at the end of the American century, and I think that's very, very hard for Americans to take.
Anna Quindlen