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Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

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
Everything
College
Skipped
Sometimes
Minutes
Happenstance
Different
Changed
Whim
Life
Went
Settled
Almost
Remind
Party
Specific
Everyone
Minute
Lives
Built

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You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.
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I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.
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The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
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We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.
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Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.
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The purse is the mirror of the soul.
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Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.
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A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.
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We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.
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We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.
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It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
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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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I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?
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Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.
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Obama doesn't seem like a burger and a beer kind of guy. I have to say, I don't find that problematic at all.
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We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.
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Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
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New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.
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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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Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.
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