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And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

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
Parents
Parent
Feel
Feels
Children
Great
Misunderstanding
Think
Obliged
Thinking
Grown

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It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.
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For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.
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An election marks the end of the affair it puts paid to the seduction of the many by the few. Pretty words, fulsome promises. We wind up married, but to whom, to what? We cannot always predict with certainty the future leader from the winning candidate. Some men grow in the job others are diminished by its demands and its grandeur.
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Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?
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Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
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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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She say guilt is a useless emotion. Oh, please, says Nancy. Guilt is what separates humans from animals.
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It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn't see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves.
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I don't know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it.
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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.
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People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.
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You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.
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Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.
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All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.
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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 life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.
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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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Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
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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.
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All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
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