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Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

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
May
Best
Mean
Writing
Austen
Like
Jane
People
Writes
Certainly
Writer

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I'm always keeping an eye on the court. Also, when the members of Congress came to his office during the budget debacle of a year and a half back and said, We want to de-fund Planned Parenthood, he said, Not going to happen. Those apparently were more or less his exact words.
Anna Quindlen
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I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.
Anna Quindlen
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More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.
Anna Quindlen
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Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.
Anna Quindlen
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For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does.
Anna Quindlen
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Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.
Anna Quindlen
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
Anna Quindlen
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Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.
Anna Quindlen
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Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen
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We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
Anna Quindlen
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Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.
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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... 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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being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.
Anna Quindlen
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Familiarity breeds content.
Anna Quindlen
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It is so easy to exist instead of live.
Anna Quindlen
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The purse is the mirror of the soul.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen