Quote

The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.

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
Always
Fear
Conformity
Speak
Urges
Doe
Voices
Ever
Mouth
Loudly
Done
Mouths
Wash
Right
Listen
Utter
Thing
Voice
Soap
Way
Words
Urge

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You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
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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.
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My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.
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We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.
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Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.
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On social welfare the Church does so much good around the world - nuns running schools and homeless shelters, priests ministering to people who are in crisis.
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Not writing at all leads to nothing.
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A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
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As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.
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Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.
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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.
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If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.
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A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.
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The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.
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Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.
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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.
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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a teachable moment.
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