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It is so easy to exist instead of live.

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
Exist
Instead
Easy
Live

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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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.
Anna Quindlen
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Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.
Anna Quindlen
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A finished person is a boring person.
Anna Quindlen
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you.
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.
Anna Quindlen
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That's really what I want in a leader I want somebody who's really, really smart.
Anna Quindlen
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Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?
Anna Quindlen
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My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.
Anna Quindlen
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All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
Anna Quindlen
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I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.
Anna Quindlen
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part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
Anna Quindlen
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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.
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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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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I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen
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The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.
Anna Quindlen
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Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? Keep her, I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.
Anna Quindlen
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I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.
Anna Quindlen