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

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.
Anna Quindlen
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It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.
Anna Quindlen
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It's an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you're a five-year-old, you don't pay any attention to what anyone thinks of you. You just sort of are in your skin.
Anna Quindlen
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All things being equal, I would choose a woman over a man in order to even the balance of power, to insinuate a different perspective into the process, to give young women something to shoot for and someone to look up to. But all things are rarely equal.
Anna Quindlen
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Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden intohistory, it is the stories we didn't write, the questions we didn't ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.
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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With reference to the younger generation...If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane.
Anna Quindlen
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I went to a women's college. ... it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool I didn't learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by that time I was one hell of a kicker.
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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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Speech is the voice of the heart.
Anna Quindlen
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Obama doesn't seem like a burger and a beer kind of guy. I have to say, I don't find that problematic at all.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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My sister is a public school teacher. She makes far far less money than I do, and gets almost no public attention for her work. Yet I believe what she does is infinitely more important and more difficult than what I do.
Anna Quindlen
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You just can't tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don't read anything unless someone tells me that it's really smart or illuminating. I don't read any reviews anymore and it's been really liberating.
Anna Quindlen
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The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.
Anna Quindlen
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All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
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