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part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.

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
Today
Poverty
Many
Conditions
Economic
Poor
Defect
War
Defects
Part
Condition
Character
Decided
Problem
Americans

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.
Anna Quindlen
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It's important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It's the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It's the way we talk about and treat one another. It's who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes dinner. It's a state of mind. It's the way we live now.
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It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I've explained fertile periods and birth control and all the other mechanics that are important to understand but never really go to the heart of the matter: I believe I will say that when you sleep with someone you take off a lot more than your clothes.
Anna Quindlen
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Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
Anna Quindlen
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The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.
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Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe.
Anna Quindlen
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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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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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People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.
Anna Quindlen
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The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.
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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The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible that is, that one is male and the other female.
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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Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.
Anna Quindlen
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I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.
Anna Quindlen
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I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.
Anna Quindlen
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Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.
Anna Quindlen
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I feel about exercise the same way that I feel about a few other things: that there is nothing wrong with it if it is done in private by consenting adults.
Anna Quindlen
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high fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later.
Anna Quindlen