Quote

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self that's why it survives

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
Simply
Hurricanes
Reading
Lamp
Spiritual
Lamps
Light
Candle
Self
Lights
Pursuit
Intellectual
Hurricane
Emotional
Survives

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.
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I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.
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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?
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All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.
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Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. Book love, Trollope called it. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.
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.
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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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The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.
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Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?
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Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
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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.
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I'm very optimistic. I think if you would describe me, my pretty consistent affect is that I'm a pretty happy person.
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We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.
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Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
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I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn't mean I don't still get an enormous kick out of infatuation: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart.
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Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.
Anna Quindlen
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Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.
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In the same way the Brits had to get used to the idea that the sun had set on the British Empire, I think that there's the subrosa feeling that we are at the end of the American century, and I think that's very, very hard for Americans to take.
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I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.
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high fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later.
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