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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.

Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
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Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Mother
Quitting
Doe
York
Soul
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Feel
Success
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Nuts
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More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.
Anna Quindlen
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The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.
Anna Quindlen
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Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.
Anna Quindlen
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So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.
Anna Quindlen
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Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.
Anna Quindlen
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It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.
Anna Quindlen
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What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.
Anna Quindlen
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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?
Anna Quindlen
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I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.
Anna Quindlen
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The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.
Anna Quindlen
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Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen
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It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.
Anna Quindlen
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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
Anna Quindlen
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If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.
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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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.
Anna Quindlen
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With reference to the younger generation...If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane.
Anna Quindlen
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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'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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These are my words this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.
Anna Quindlen