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Frankly, I'm mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.

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
Hard
Edges
Things
Telling
Thinking
Case
Homogenize
Cases
Soften
Worst
Daunting
Audience
Mainly
Story
Frankly
Stories
Invites

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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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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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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Obama doesn't seem like a burger and a beer kind of guy. I have to say, I don't find that problematic at all.
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Testosterone does not have to be toxic.
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You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.
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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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I think that after a while you realize that your husband can't be all things to you and certainly you don't want the kids to be all things to you, because that would be a terrible weight for them and that where you really find solace a lot of the time is with your girlfriends.
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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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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.
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When children are small, parents should run their lives and not the other way around.
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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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If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.
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Speech is the voice of the heart.
Anna Quindlen
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I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
Anna Quindlen
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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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Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.
Anna Quindlen
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By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10 not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.
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I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?
Anna Quindlen
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It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it isfinished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows--and never forgets--that they are yours.
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what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.
Anna Quindlen