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

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.
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So you're getting squeezed at both sides. You're taking care of your mom and dad and you're still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there's a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled.
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We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.
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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.
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It is so easy to exist instead of live.
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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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Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.
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I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.
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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
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When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.
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I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.
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Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.
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The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.
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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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Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self that's why it survives
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Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.
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I do get a sense that there's a huge disconnect between the political powers and what's really happening, so right-wing conservatives can talk about contraception all they want, but the women of America are using birth control. It's as simple as that.
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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.
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People always blame the girl she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
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Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.
Anna Quindlen