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

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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Barack Obama is the kind of guy who likes to do things by inches, he's the kind of guy who likes to build consensus and compromise.
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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.
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There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
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I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
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Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated.
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Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
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Your hair isn't quite right and maybe you're a size bigger than you should be and on and on and on. I think there comes a moment when you've matured to the point where you suddenly think, nonsense. I am fine just the way I am.
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However, there will be a Republican Party platform that will coalesce around their convention. Unless I miss my guess, it will be considerably more conservative on these issues, perhaps even than Governor Romney is, and I think that that will give Americans a clear set of choices about all issues, but about women's issues too.
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We are awash in the revealed world.
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The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible that is, that one is male and the other female.
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Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.
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While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
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All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.
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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.
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My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.
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I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.
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Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.
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The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
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the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
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When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.
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