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what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.

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
Values
Words
Devalue
Use
Reflect
Matter
Perceive
Things
Matters
People
Places
Value
Call

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.
Anna Quindlen
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[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.
Anna Quindlen
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The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.
Anna Quindlen
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When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.
Anna Quindlen
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Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.
Anna Quindlen
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All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
Anna Quindlen
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By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10 not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.
Anna Quindlen
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While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
Anna Quindlen
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Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
Anna Quindlen
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Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.
Anna Quindlen
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A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that's just had a tune-up. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.
Anna Quindlen
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There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existance
Anna Quindlen
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One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
Anna Quindlen
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There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Anna Quindlen
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However, there will be a Republican Party platform that will coalesce around their convention. Unless I miss my guess, it will be considerably more conservative on these issues, perhaps even than Governor Romney is, and I think that that will give Americans a clear set of choices about all issues, but about women's issues too.
Anna Quindlen
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The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.
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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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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I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
Anna Quindlen
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I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.
Anna Quindlen