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People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.

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
People
Dog
Homage
Independent
Evolutionary
Pay
Pet
Side
Cats
Sides
Dogs
Free
Acquire
Wish
Cat
Servile
Character
Roots
Salute

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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But never fear, gentlemen castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.
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I don't know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it.
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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.
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The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.
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I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.
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My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.
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But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm just remembering myself at 22 or 23. I was all engine and no steering. (Laughter) I had the wheels but I had no steering. I do think it's true that when you're younger, you're more likely to listen to all the naysayers, and people are always telling you how you ought to behave and what kind of job you should get and how you should look.
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And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.
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There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance
Anna Quindlen
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I was very driven, very focused, very ambitious. I mean, when I look back on myself in my 20s, part of me just cringes.
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I know that it's very dispiriting for people in their twenties, who expected to graduate from college, get their own apartments, get a job, and move forward with their lives, and in fact are still now living with Mom and Dad, which is challenging for all involved.
Anna Quindlen
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There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.
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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.
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It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn't see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves.
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It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.
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