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

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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All things being equal, I would choose a woman over a man in order to even the balance of power, to insinuate a different perspective into the process, to give young women something to shoot for and someone to look up to. But all things are rarely equal.
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All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.
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I think Americans suspect, without even being able to articulate it, that we're at the end of the American century that we're at the end of the 100 or 125 or 150 years when we were the undisputed arbiter and leader of the world.
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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
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There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
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Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.
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Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.
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I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.
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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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Your kids are launched. You love your work but you understand how to place it in the panorama of the rest of your life. There's this line in the book, and when I wrote it I thought yes, that's it - if you think of life as a job, maybe by the time you get to, say, in my case, 60, you've finally gotten good at it.
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I sort of feel like it comes around again. That when you get to a certain age, when you've lived enough and you've got your friends to support you and your family to support you, you wake up one morning and think, yeah, I'm okay.
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Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
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You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.
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I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.
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Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.
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A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
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There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
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I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.
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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.
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Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.
Anna Quindlen