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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
Money
Gets
School
Teacher
Doe
Public
Important
Almost
Work
Attention
Believe
Less
Difficult
Infinitely
Makes
Sister

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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If I waited long enough and said, Okay, so what you're saying is you liked your life a lot better when you were 30? everybody would get real quiet and then admit that that wasn't the case, that they really felt like they were sort of growing into themselves in a way.
Anna Quindlen
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I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.
Anna Quindlen
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I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.
Anna Quindlen
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She say guilt is a useless emotion. Oh, please, says Nancy. Guilt is what separates humans from animals.
Anna Quindlen
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And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.
Anna Quindlen
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I like to say that my mother had a very ordinary life. From the outside it didn't look like there was anything particularly special or wonderful about it, but when you watch somebody hold on to that life with both hands, it makes you think that life must be pretty damn good.
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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The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
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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God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.
Anna Quindlen
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When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.
Anna Quindlen
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Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.
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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The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.
Anna Quindlen
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While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.
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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When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women?
Anna Quindlen
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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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I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.
Anna Quindlen
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There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
Anna Quindlen