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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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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Stories
Confusion
Skimming
Ideas
Surface
Confusions
Enough
Crisis
Crises
Way
Seen
Engaging
Never
Heard
Passages
Life
Story
Facing
People
Future
Journalism
Winging
Idea
Touched
Indelibly

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.
Anna Quindlen
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There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.
Anna Quindlen
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I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.
Anna Quindlen
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I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.
Anna Quindlen
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It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
Anna Quindlen
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New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.
Anna Quindlen
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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
Anna Quindlen
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The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Anna Quindlen
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Now the baby boomers, i.e., us, are getting older, and were suddenly discovering that there are great things about getting older. You have time for your friendships and you appreciate them in ways that you didn't before.
Anna Quindlen
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When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.
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
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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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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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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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But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.
Anna Quindlen
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Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.
Anna Quindlen
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Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
Anna Quindlen
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Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.
Anna Quindlen
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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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If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.
Anna Quindlen