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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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In the same way the Brits had to get used to the idea that the sun had set on the British Empire, I think that there's the subrosa feeling that we are at the end of the American century, and I think that's very, very hard for Americans to take.
Anna Quindlen
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Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. Book love, Trollope called it. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.
Anna Quindlen
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And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.
Anna Quindlen
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For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.
Anna Quindlen
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Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
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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The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.
Anna Quindlen
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In life, the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end.
Anna Quindlen
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I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.
Anna Quindlen
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I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it...why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer.
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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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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I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.
Anna Quindlen
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I think Americans suspect, without even being able to articulate it, that we're at the end of the American century that we're at the end of the 100 or 125 or 150 years when we were the undisputed arbiter and leader of the world.
Anna Quindlen
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Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.
Anna Quindlen
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Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.
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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A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.
Anna Quindlen
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It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.
Anna Quindlen
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Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.
Anna Quindlen