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

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My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.
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Familiarity breeds content.
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It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
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I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.
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If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
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[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.
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I was a kid who sometimes got in trouble because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, which turned out to be an advantage when I became an opinion columnist.
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There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.
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Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
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Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.
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My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.
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being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.
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The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.
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February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.
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The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific andtorturous, involving and utterly tedious, all at the same time. The world is full of women made to feel strange because what everyone assumes comes naturally is so difficult to do--never mind to do well.
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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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If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.
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When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.
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