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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.

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
Must
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Giving
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Believe
Latter
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More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.
Anna Quindlen
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The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.
Anna Quindlen
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Speech is the voice of the heart.
Anna Quindlen
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People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.
Anna Quindlen
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Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
Anna Quindlen
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A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
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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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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Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.
Anna Quindlen
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I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.
Anna Quindlen
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Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
Anna Quindlen
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I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.
Anna Quindlen
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A finished person is a boring person.
Anna Quindlen
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My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.
Anna Quindlen
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Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.
Anna Quindlen
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If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details...real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.
Anna Quindlen
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I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.
Anna Quindlen
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Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? Keep her, I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.
Anna Quindlen