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I got a fortune cookie that said, To remember is to understand. I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

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
Advice
Cookies
Life
Writer
Editor
Like
Parent
Editors
Child
Lawyer
Understand
Judge
Remember
Fortune
Children
Forgotten
Cookie
Good
Judging
Remembers

More quotes by 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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Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
Anna Quindlen
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Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
Anna Quindlen
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It's important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It's the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It's the way we talk about and treat one another. It's who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes dinner. It's a state of mind. It's the way we live now.
Anna Quindlen
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I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Anna Quindlen
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I think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.
Anna Quindlen
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I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.
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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The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.
Anna Quindlen
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I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything particularly special or wonderful about it, but when you watch somebody hold on to that life with both hands, it makes you think that life must be pretty damn good.
Anna Quindlen
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New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.
Anna Quindlen
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The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you.
Anna Quindlen
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Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
Anna Quindlen
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I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.
Anna Quindlen
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The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
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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Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.
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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The women of my mother's generation had, in the main, only one decision to make about their lives: who they would marry. From that, so much else followed: where they would live, in what sort of conditions, whether they would be happy or sad or, so often, a bit of both. There were roles and there were rules.
Anna Quindlen
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Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Anna Quindlen