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I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

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
Literature
Persons
Person
Wanted
Personage
Comfortable

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.
Anna Quindlen
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Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.
Anna Quindlen
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Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.
Anna Quindlen
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So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.
Anna Quindlen
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All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.
Anna Quindlen
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You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some drunk comes around a corner and runs a stop sign.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
Anna Quindlen
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We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.
Anna Quindlen
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Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.
Anna Quindlen
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By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10 not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.
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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A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.
Anna Quindlen
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you.
Anna Quindlen