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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
Wisdom
Coating
Age
Inertia
Often
Candy
Things
Conformity
Conventional
Useful
Realizing
Simply

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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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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.
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After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'
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The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.
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The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.
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Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me.
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The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
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Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.
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All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
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The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible that is, that one is male and the other female.
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With reference to the younger generation...If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane.
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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.
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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.
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I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.
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Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
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I do tend to be almost kind of Pollyanna-ish person.
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We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.
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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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My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.
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The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.
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