Quote

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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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Two
Autonomy
Seems
Stages
America
Teenager
Human
Conflict
Humans
Development
Country
Security
Stage
Toddler
Forever
Characterized

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One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
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knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.
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So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.
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The women of my mother's generation had, in the main, only one decision to make about their lives: who they would marry. From that, so much else followed: where they would live, in what sort of conditions, whether they would be happy or sad or, so often, a bit of both. There were roles and there were rules.
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I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.
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All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
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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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My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.
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February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.
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I think a lot of people, but particularly a lot of women, get to this stage when I'd say they're over 50. We face a lot of hard judgment from the world, we women. If you're a full-time mother, you should be out working. If you're out working, your kids must be being overlooked.
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If you raise an intelligent girl she will become a feminist because of the facts of her own life. Raising feminist boys is more difficult. Raising egalitarian boys. One of the reasons you have to raise them that way is because it's better for them.
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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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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.
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I got a fortune cookie that said, To remember is to understand. I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.
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If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
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Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.
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There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.
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I went to a women's college. ... it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool I didn't learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by that time I was one hell of a kicker.
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Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
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You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.
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