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I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

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
Really
Books
Things
Happy
Think
Write
Thinking
Wells
Challenging
People
Book
Novels
Well
Novel
Writing
Challenges
Going
Probably

More quotes by 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.
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And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.
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[In the aftermath of death] Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.
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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.
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My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.
Anna Quindlen
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I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.
Anna Quindlen
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All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
Anna Quindlen
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Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.
Anna Quindlen
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Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
Anna Quindlen
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I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.
Anna Quindlen
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We've made hyper motherhood a measure of female success.
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Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen
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It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.
Anna Quindlen
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I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.
Anna Quindlen
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I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.
Anna Quindlen
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These are my words this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.
Anna Quindlen
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I think there was a long period of time when we got real invested in a youth culture, and not coincidentally it was when the baby boomers, who let's face it, take up a lot of space on the planet, were young.
Anna Quindlen
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Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.
Anna Quindlen
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Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.
Anna Quindlen
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Today is the only guarantee you get.
Anna Quindlen