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One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

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
Wisdom
Coating
Age
Inertia
Often
Candy
Things
Conformity
Conventional
Useful
Realizing

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The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.
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Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.
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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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In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.
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Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.
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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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I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?
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When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.
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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 think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.
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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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And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.
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[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
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It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows--and never forgets--that they are yours.
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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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Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.
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One of the interesting things I discovered, talking about your grandmother, is I did a search of my uses of the word elderly in my copy over the years, and you will not be surprised to hear that the older I got the less often I used the word elderly in print.
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I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.
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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a teachable moment.
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Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn't read, I don't know what I'd do. But as a writer, it's both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along.
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