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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
Never
Heard
Passages
Life
Story
Facing
People
Future
Journalism
Winging
Idea
Touched
Indelibly
Stories
Confusion
Skimming
Ideas
Surface
Confusions
Enough
Crisis
Crises
Way
Seen
Engaging

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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That's really what I want in a leader I want somebody who's really, really smart.
Anna Quindlen
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I'm a Catholic of the New Testament, I'm not a Catholic of the hierarchy.
Anna Quindlen
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Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
Anna Quindlen
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I do think that people who are now in their sixties and their seventies are living a different kind of life than their grandparents led, even in these tough times. A lot of them are more active, a lot of them are still working, which was not the case when our grandparents were in their sixties.
Anna Quindlen
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knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.
Anna Quindlen
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Predictions that unit cohesion could not survive honesty about sexual orientation were simply wrong. What does threaten morale arethe prolonged investigations, the questioning of friends and co-workers, the searches of barracks for magazines and letters, the witch hunts.
Anna Quindlen
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The closest thing to an outline is, because my memory is so bad now, if something occurs to me that I think might be important or pivotal, a lot of times I'll scribble notes down somewhere until I can get back to the book. Of course half the time I look at those notes the next morning and think, What was that about?
Anna Quindlen
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You just can't tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don't read anything unless someone tells me that it's really smart or illuminating. I don't read any reviews anymore and it's been really liberating.
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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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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Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
Anna Quindlen
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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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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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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Obama doesn't seem like a burger and a beer kind of guy. I have to say, I don't find that problematic at all.
Anna Quindlen
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I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.
Anna Quindlen
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There's no greater happiness than doing something every day that you love, that you feel you do in a satisfactory fashion, and which both supports and gives you time to support your family. I felt so lucky to have all that.
Anna Quindlen
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Socialized medicine, some still cry, but it's long been socialized, with those covered paying for those who are underinsured. American medicine is simply socialized badly, penny wise and pound foolish.
Anna Quindlen
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The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.
Anna Quindlen
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I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Anna Quindlen