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I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.

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
Start
Ever
Writing
Work
Mental

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.
Anna Quindlen
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We take our vitamins, we go to exercise class, we put on our seat belts. And then something blindsides us and gives the lie to our carefully constructed facade of safety.
Anna Quindlen
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So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.
Anna Quindlen
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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
Anna Quindlen
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I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
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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All of life like a series of tableaux, and in the living we missed so much, hid so much, left so much undone and unsaid.
Anna Quindlen
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I am an affirmative action hire.
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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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.
Anna Quindlen
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If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.
Anna Quindlen
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Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.
Anna Quindlen
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Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
Anna Quindlen
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being a parent is not transaction ... we do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: we are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.
Anna Quindlen
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There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too.
Anna Quindlen
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That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.
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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I don't know what I would do in the world without [female friends] for advice, for comfort, for simply knowing that there is someone out there who knows me as I am, and loves me despite and because of it.
Anna Quindlen
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I was a kid who sometimes got in trouble because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, which turned out to be an advantage when I became an opinion columnist.
Anna Quindlen
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I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.
Anna Quindlen