Quote

There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.

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
Groups
Muscle
Alone
Lets
Maybe
Asleep
Doesn
Muscles
Around
Shoulders
Really
Group
Never
Perfection
Dance
Seizes

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I had that feeling you have when you're watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn't exactly real, that it will be gone by the time you get home and make a cup of tea. I found a lot of life like that when I was younger, as though I was practicing for what came later.
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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.
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I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.
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All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
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All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.
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If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.
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My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room, and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person, born on the hottest day of the year, conceived on a Christmas Eve, made by his father and me miraculously from scratch.
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People always blame the girl she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
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When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.
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When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.
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The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.
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So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you always know that you pushed hard and aimed high. Take a leap of faith. Fear not. Courage is the ultimate career move.
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Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.
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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.
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London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
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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.
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This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.
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She say guilt is a useless emotion. Oh, please, says Nancy. Guilt is what separates humans from animals.
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For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.
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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