Quote

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?

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
Whether
Center
Conundrum
Stuff
Anyway
Conundrums
Come
Selling
Cigarettes
Always
Essential
Taxation
Essentials
Deadly
Conversation
Cigarette
Education
Addiction
Talking
Smoking

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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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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I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and one of the things I like to say is that one of the biggest impediments I had to becoming a successful writer is I had a very happy childhood.
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The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.
Anna Quindlen
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The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible that is, that one is male and the other female.
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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.
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.
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.
Anna Quindlen
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Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen
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Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.
Anna Quindlen
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For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.
Anna Quindlen
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Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
Anna Quindlen
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[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
Anna Quindlen
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Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me.
Anna Quindlen
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I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.
Anna Quindlen
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God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.
Anna Quindlen
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So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you always know that you pushed hard and aimed high. Take a leap of faith. Fear not. Courage is the ultimate career move.
Anna Quindlen
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Writing for UrbanMoms has awarded me a multitude of amazing opportunities. I have traveled to new places alone and with my family. I have discovered new products, new books, new trends and new restaurants, and been able to share them with my readers. I've met other wonderful writers and many incredible celebrities.
Anna Quindlen
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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
Anna Quindlen
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This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.
Anna Quindlen