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You just can't tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don't read anything unless someone tells me that it's really smart or illuminating. I don't read any reviews anymore and it's been really liberating.

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
Unless
Illuminating
Read
Liberating
Sense
Reviews
Tell
Motive
Someone
Tells
Anything
Anymore
Really
Intelligence
Smart

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.
Anna Quindlen
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Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.
Anna Quindlen
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I go online all the time, I just don't read about myself. I read a fashion website called Go Fug Yourself. I actually correspond with the Fug Girls and that's great.
Anna Quindlen
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God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.
Anna Quindlen
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A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.
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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A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
Anna Quindlen
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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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Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.
Anna Quindlen
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All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.
Anna Quindlen
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I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Anna Quindlen
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I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.
Anna Quindlen
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I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
Anna Quindlen
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Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.
Anna Quindlen
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Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.
Anna Quindlen
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More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.
Anna Quindlen
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We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.
Anna Quindlen
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We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.
Anna Quindlen
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And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.
Anna Quindlen