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Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

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
Enough
Children
Bookshelves
Decorating
Consists
Mostly
Building

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
Anna Quindlen
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Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.
Anna Quindlen
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I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.
Anna Quindlen
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Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
Anna Quindlen
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It's an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you're a five-year-old, you don't pay any attention to what anyone thinks of you. You just sort of are in your skin.
Anna Quindlen
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I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.
Anna Quindlen
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Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.
Anna Quindlen
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Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? Keep her, I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.
Anna Quindlen
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Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
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I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.
Anna Quindlen
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Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
Anna Quindlen
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Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tried to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.
Anna Quindlen
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Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
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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You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.
Anna Quindlen
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I think when people keep saying to you, You're good at this, you just keep doing it.
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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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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If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.
Anna Quindlen