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I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

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
Enough
Bookshelves
Children
Decorating
Kind
Consists
Would
Mostly
Think
Content
Thinking
Building
People
Grew
Literature

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.
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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When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.
Anna Quindlen
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It's an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you're a five-year-old, you don't pay any attention to what anyone thinks of you. You just sort of are in your skin.
Anna Quindlen
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The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.
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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Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.
Anna Quindlen
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Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy.
Anna Quindlen
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That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.
Anna Quindlen
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I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.
Anna Quindlen
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The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.
Anna Quindlen
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You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some drunk comes around a corner and runs a stop sign.
Anna Quindlen
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We are awash in the revealed world.
Anna Quindlen
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People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father and his brothers and sisters and his mother are all people who would sit around with a Tom Collins and tell stories that seemed to get better and better each time they told them.
Anna Quindlen
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being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.
Anna Quindlen
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The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
Anna Quindlen
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The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.
Anna Quindlen
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Now the baby boomers, i.e., us, are getting older, and were suddenly discovering that there are great things about getting older. You have time for your friendships and you appreciate them in ways that you didn't before.
Anna Quindlen
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Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.
Anna Quindlen
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[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.
Anna Quindlen