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being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.

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
Stay
Transaction
Leave
Transactions
Parent
Endeavor
Strong
Loving
Give
Forward
Enough
Ultimate
Giving
Pay
Good
Parents

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.
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That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.
Anna Quindlen
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Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.
Anna Quindlen
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The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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an the president bring out the voters who were so enthusiastic about him in 2008 and seem a little disenchanted now? Can he bring out young people? Can he bring out Latinos? Can he bring out those white suburban moms?
Anna Quindlen
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I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.
Anna Quindlen
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Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
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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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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Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
Anna Quindlen
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A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.
Anna Quindlen
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If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be cheap, too.
Anna Quindlen
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I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.
Anna Quindlen
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In the same way the Brits had to get used to the idea that the sun had set on the British Empire, I think that there's the subrosa feeling that we are at the end of the American century, and I think that's very, very hard for Americans to take.
Anna Quindlen
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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.
Anna Quindlen
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I'm a Catholic of the New Testament, I'm not a Catholic of the hierarchy.
Anna Quindlen
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I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.
Anna Quindlen