Quote

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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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Trying
Sleep
Finally
Believe
Understand
Son
Really
Feelings
Periods
Never
Someone
Sex
Mechanics
Matter
Birth
Fertile
Take
Clothes
Mechanic
Important
Control
Explained
Heart
Teach
Sons

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?
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.
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you.
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I think Americans suspect, without even being able to articulate it, that we're at the end of the American century that we're at the end of the 100 or 125 or 150 years when we were the undisputed arbiter and leader of the world.
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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.
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Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.
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When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.
Anna Quindlen
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Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
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
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
Anna Quindlen
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This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.
Anna Quindlen
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I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and one of the things I like to say is that one of the biggest impediments I had to becoming a successful writer is I had a very happy childhood.
Anna Quindlen
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That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.
Anna Quindlen
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For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.
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Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
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London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
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Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. Book love, Trollope called it. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.
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A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.
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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Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
Anna Quindlen