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

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.
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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.
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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.
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People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.
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Barack Obama presents as kind of a cool character, and I think that that's his natural personality.
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These are my words this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.
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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.
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I'm always keeping an eye on the court. Also, when the members of Congress came to his office during the budget debacle of a year and a half back and said, We want to de-fund Planned Parenthood, he said, Not going to happen. Those apparently were more or less his exact words.
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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.
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It is so easy to exist instead of live.
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.
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I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.
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However, there will be a Republican Party platform that will coalesce around their convention. Unless I miss my guess, it will be considerably more conservative on these issues, perhaps even than Governor Romney is, and I think that that will give Americans a clear set of choices about all issues, but about women's issues too.
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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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You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.
Anna Quindlen
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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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The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.
Anna Quindlen
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the most sacred business of judges is not to ratify the will of the majority but to protect the minority from its tyranny.
Anna Quindlen
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It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women's rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement.
Anna Quindlen
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Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.
Anna Quindlen