Quote

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

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
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One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.
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All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.
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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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This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.
Anna Quindlen
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There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
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I don't understand how people learn to live in the world if they haven't had siblings. Everything I learned about negotiation, territoriality, coexistence, dislike, inbred differences and love despite knowledge I learned from my four younger siblings.
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Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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It's important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It's the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It's the way we talk about and treat one another. It's who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes dinner. It's a state of mind. It's the way we live now.
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All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
Anna Quindlen
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Predictions that unit cohesion could not survive honesty about sexual orientation were simply wrong. What does threaten morale arethe prolonged investigations, the questioning of friends and co-workers, the searches of barracks for magazines and letters, the witch hunts.
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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Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.
Anna Quindlen
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Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.
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Now the baby boomers, i.e., us, are getting older, and were suddenly discovering that there are great things about getting older. You have time for your friendships and you appreciate them in ways that you didn't before.
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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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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With reference to the younger generation...If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane.
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