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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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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Makes
Sister
Money
Gets
School
Teacher
Doe
Public
Important
Almost
Work
Attention
Believe
Less
Difficult
Infinitely

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.
Anna Quindlen
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I really feel like if you can get past your fear, if you can say, Uh-uh, I'm afraid to do that and I'm going to do it anyhow, that that's really the way to have a satisfying life moving forward. I think I had that kind of fearlessness even as a young person. It wasn't tempered by experience or wisdom, but it took me a long way.
Anna Quindlen
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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
Anna Quindlen
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Guilt is what separates humans from animals.
Anna Quindlen
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I got a fortune cookie that said, To remember is to understand. I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.
Anna Quindlen
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Keeping kids safe is sometimes a delusion. The world is a perilous place. Sometimes the kitchen is a perilous place.
Anna Quindlen
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We are awash in the revealed world.
Anna Quindlen
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There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
Anna Quindlen
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There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.
Anna Quindlen
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The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.
Anna Quindlen
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Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.
Anna Quindlen
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I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.
Anna Quindlen
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the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
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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It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn't see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves.
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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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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When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.
Anna Quindlen