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I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and one of the things I like to say is that one of the biggest impediments I had to becoming a successful writer is I had a very happy childhood.

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
Happy
Philadelphia
Things
Suburbs
Like
Biggest
Childhood
Writer
Becoming
Grew
Successful
Impediments

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.
Anna Quindlen
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A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
Anna Quindlen
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Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.
Anna Quindlen
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I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.
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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It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn't see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves.
Anna Quindlen
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Speech is the voice of the heart.
Anna Quindlen
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There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Anna Quindlen
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knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.
Anna Quindlen
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Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.
Anna Quindlen
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When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.
Anna Quindlen
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We are awash in the revealed world.
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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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.
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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While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.
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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We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.
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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When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.
Anna Quindlen