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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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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Stories
Paid
Operate
Writing
Prove
Reporters
News
Current
Ones
Journalism
Events
Currents
Solidify
Asks
Begins
Harden
Write
Finally
Damaging
Didn
Questions
Retrospect

More quotes by 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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I'm a Catholic of the New Testament, I'm not a Catholic of the hierarchy.
Anna Quindlen
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People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.
Anna Quindlen
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You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.
Anna Quindlen
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Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?
Anna Quindlen
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If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.
Anna Quindlen
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Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.
Anna Quindlen
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You can get rid of the column. It's a little like staying at a hotel you get used to the shape of the room, and then you're gone. With a novel you move into town and stay for a long time. That's both comforting and terrifying.
Anna Quindlen
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I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Anna Quindlen
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When you look at the women that have made a real difference in the world throughout history, what they’ve done has almost always been defined by fearlessness. That’s something I came to at a certain point I wish I’d come to it younger. Stop looking over your shoulder — there’s nobody who matters back there.
Anna Quindlen
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The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.
Anna Quindlen
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I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.
Anna Quindlen
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There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him 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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Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What 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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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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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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If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
Anna Quindlen
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If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.
Anna Quindlen
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I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
Anna Quindlen