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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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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Habit
Least
Wells
Everything
Well
Really

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.
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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If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.
Anna Quindlen
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The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.
Anna Quindlen
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When you look at the women that have made a real difference in the world throughout history, what they’ve done has almost always been defined by fearlessness. That’s something I came to at a certain point I wish I’d come to it younger. Stop looking over your shoulder — there’s nobody who matters back there.
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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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a teachable moment.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.
Anna Quindlen
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God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.
Anna Quindlen
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As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.
Anna Quindlen
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People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.
Anna Quindlen
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... It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people's crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story, but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.
Anna Quindlen
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One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word elderly in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? Keep her, I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.
Anna Quindlen
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Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden intohistory, it is the stories we didn't write, the questions we didn't ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.
Anna Quindlen
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If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.
Anna Quindlen
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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
Anna Quindlen