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I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

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
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Ways
Talk
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Hope
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Illuminate
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More quotes by 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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My sister is a public school teacher. She makes far far less money than I do, and gets almost no public attention for her work. Yet I believe what she does is infinitely more important and more difficult than what I do.
Anna Quindlen
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She say guilt is a useless emotion. Oh, please, says Nancy. Guilt is what separates humans from animals.
Anna Quindlen
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Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
Anna Quindlen
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Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.
Anna Quindlen
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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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Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.
Anna Quindlen
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As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.
Anna Quindlen
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Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Anna Quindlen
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I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.
Anna Quindlen
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When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.
Anna Quindlen
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The women of my mother's generation had, in the main, only one decision to make about their lives: who they would marry. From that, so much else followed: where they would live, in what sort of conditions, whether they would be happy or sad or, so often, a bit of both. There were roles and there were rules.
Anna Quindlen
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If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.
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.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.
Anna Quindlen
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We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.
Anna Quindlen
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When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.
Anna Quindlen
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I got a fortune cookie that said, To remember is to understand. I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.
Anna Quindlen
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I'm very optimistic. I think if you would describe me, my pretty consistent affect is that I'm a pretty happy person.
Anna Quindlen
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The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.
Anna Quindlen