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Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

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
Become
Passes
Really
Wheels
Time
Boredom
Fuel
Quiet
Creativity
Inside
Moving
Hiatus

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.
Anna Quindlen
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Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?
Anna Quindlen
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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?
Anna Quindlen
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For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does.
Anna Quindlen
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Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
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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Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.
Anna Quindlen
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It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.
Anna Quindlen
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I'm a Catholic of the New Testament, I'm not a Catholic of the hierarchy.
Anna Quindlen
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Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.
Anna Quindlen
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I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.
Anna Quindlen
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Obama doesn't seem like a burger and a beer kind of guy. I have to say, I don't find that problematic at all.
Anna Quindlen
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While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
Anna Quindlen
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People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father and his brothers and sisters and his mother are all people who would sit around with a Tom Collins and tell stories that seemed to get better and better each time they told them.
Anna Quindlen
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That's really what I want in a leader I want somebody who's really, really smart.
Anna Quindlen
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If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.
Anna Quindlen