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Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.

Susan Orlean

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Susan Orlean
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 31
Journalist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Comes
Actual
Experience
Secure
Seems
Profession
Children
Notion
Writing
Parents
Lucrative
Work
Parent
Olympian
Lines
Suggesting
Almost
Persistence

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Most fourth graders can't say why Abraham Lincoln is an important historical figure? Wow. This is far more distressing than if the news had been that fourth graders were bad at reciting multiplication tables, because you can, in fact, Google that.
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I would like to make sleeping my new hobby, except that I'm too tired, really, to have a hobby. But a girl can always dream.
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Unlimited choice is paralyzing. The Internet has made this form of paralysis due to option overload a standard feature of comfortable modern life.
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In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.
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The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I'm always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest.
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It seems that half the point of being in Miami Beach - particularly the northern end of South Beach - is to be observed by people-watchers like me, and the display along Ocean Drive during my visit was, as always, sublime.
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The biggest problem with working at a treadmill desk: the compulsion to announce constantly that you are working at a treadmill desk.
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In the course of transferring all my CDs to my iPod, I have found myself wandering the musical hallways of my past and reacquainting myself with music I haven't listened to in years.
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When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.
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I remember thinking that a girdle was barbaric, and that never in a million years would I treat myself like a sleeping bag being shoved into a stuff sack. Never! Instead, I would run marathons and work out and be in perfect shape and reject the tyranny of the girdle forever.
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I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.
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The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I'm tired. I have been tired for decades. I am tired in the morning and I am tired while becalmed in the slough of the afternoon, and I am tired in the evening, except right when I try to go to sleep.
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You have to appreciate the spiritual component of having an opportunity to do something as wondrous as writing. You should be practical and smart and you should have a good agent and you should work really, really hard. But you should also be filled with awe and gratitude about this amazing way to be in the world.
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I went to a football school, which meant that I went to a university that served up education and was simultaneously operating a sports franchise.
Susan Orlean
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When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes.
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I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.
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When we stopped to rest and Tony tried to figure out what was wrong with his compass, I asked him what he thought it was about orchids that seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and worship them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait for nearly a decade for one of them to flower.
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When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went down, unless you were flamboyant with your spending. Then phone calls became as cheap as dirt and as constant as rain, and I was on the phone all the time.
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Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it's more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone's throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale.
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The iPhone calendar isn't bad, but it isn't great, either. It only offers a day view and a month view - it doesn't have a week view, which drives me crazy.
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