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

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Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.
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Speech is the voice of the heart.
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I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now.
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
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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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The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
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There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.
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We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.
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It is so easy to exist instead of live.
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[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
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A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.
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In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.
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I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
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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.
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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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I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.
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Your kids are launched. You love your work but you understand how to place it in the panorama of the rest of your life. There's this line in the book, and when I wrote it I thought yes, that's it - if you think of life as a job, maybe by the time you get to, say, in my case, 60, you've finally gotten good at it.
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The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.
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Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
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The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul.
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