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I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.

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
Thinking
Machines
Invented
Agree
Alternatives
Anyone
Torture
Upon
Reasonable
Nautilus
History
Machine
Prototype
Comes
Considered
Diplomacy
Time
Clearly
Fitness
Think
Suddenly
Alternative

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.
Anna Quindlen
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Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.
Anna Quindlen
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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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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.
Anna Quindlen
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Not writing at all leads to nothing.
Anna Quindlen
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There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
Anna Quindlen
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now.
Anna Quindlen
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The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Anyone who has breast-fed knows two things for sure: The baby wants to be fed at the most inopportune times, in the most inopportune places, and the baby will prevail.... And so the baby should, and the mom, too. Sometimes a breast is a sexual object, and sometimes it's a food delivery system, and one need not preclude nor color the other.
Anna Quindlen
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Now, a lot of people are challenged by the fact that a record number of people in their sixties have living parents, and a record number of people in their sixties have kids who may still depend upon them.
Anna Quindlen
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If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.
Anna Quindlen
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My mother was an incredibly loving mother.
Anna Quindlen
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I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Anna Quindlen
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Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.
Anna Quindlen
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
Anna Quindlen
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I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.
Anna Quindlen