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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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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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I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.
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In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.
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It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.
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Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
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The purse is the mirror of the soul.
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The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
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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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Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.
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I know that it's very dispiriting for people in their twenties, who expected to graduate from college, get their own apartments, get a job, and move forward with their lives, and in fact are still now living with Mom and Dad, which is challenging for all involved.
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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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I'm writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who's prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovered about those additional years is that I don't think they really are added to the end of life.
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I think that after a while you realize that your husband can't be all things to you and certainly you don't want the kids to be all things to you, because that would be a terrible weight for them and that where you really find solace a lot of the time is with your girlfriends.
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the separation of church and state grew out of a desire, not so much to protect government from religion, but to protect religion from government.
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When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.
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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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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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I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything particularly special or wonderful about it, but when you watch somebody hold on to that life with both hands, it makes you think that life must be pretty damn good.
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While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.
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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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