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[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.

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
Feels
Aftermath
Enormous
Small
Talk
Bigs
Death

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.
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We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.
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I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.
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I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
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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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Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.
Anna Quindlen
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I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.
Anna Quindlen
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I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.
Anna Quindlen
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I am an affirmative action hire.
Anna Quindlen
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All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.
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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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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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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Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.
Anna Quindlen
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I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.
Anna Quindlen
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In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.
Anna Quindlen