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But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.

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
Century
Entering
Information
Shock
Appalls
Age
Perception
Stuns
Knowledge
Ignorance
Shocks
Half
Level
Cumulative
Also
Second
Insensitive
Make
Levels
Numb
Changed
Familiarity

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Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tried to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.
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What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.
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There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.
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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.
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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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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.
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I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.
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I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.
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A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
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All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.
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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.
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part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.
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I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.
Anna Quindlen
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Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.
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Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.
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When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.
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After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'
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Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.
Anna Quindlen
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I know a lot and have written a lot and have thought a lot about motherhood.
Anna Quindlen
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We are awash in the revealed world.
Anna Quindlen