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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.

-Anna Quindlen

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You Just Can't Tell

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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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.

I've Been A Feminist Since I Was A Teenager, But Originally It Was Because I Wanted To Make The World A Better Place For Me.

Reporters Are Not Paid To Operate In Retrospect. Because When News Begins To Solidify Into Current Events And Finally Harden Intohistory, It Is The Stories We Didn't Write, The Questions We Didn't Ask That Prove Far, Far More Damaging Than The Ones We Did.

I Do Not Like Football, Which I Think Of As A Game In Which Two Tractors Approach Each Other From Opposite Directions And Collide. Besides, I Have Contempt For A Game In Which Players Have To Wear So Much Equipment. Men Play Basketball In Their Underwear, Which Seems Just Right To Me.

Each Instance Of Sexual Harassment Has To Be Judged On Its Merits. Facts, Timing, Motives, Credibility: All Must Be Considered Before We Make Up Our Own Minds What To Believe.

Ever Since The Evil Empire Turned Out To Be A Collection Of Third-world Countries, Americans Aligned On The Far Right Have Tried To Cast Gay Men And Lesbians As The New Enemy, Calculating Deviants Seducing The Nation's Young, Anti-avon Ladies Selling Sodomy Door-to-door. This Simply Won't Wash. Just As Seeing The Russians Up Close And Personal On Television Humanized Them, So Seeing The Lesbian Grandmother Of Two Little Girls Wearing Her Gold Medal With Pride Makes The Notion Of Otherness, Much Less Deviance, Silly And Ignorant.

Now The Baby Boomers, I.e., Us, Are Getting Older, And Were Suddenly Discovering That There Are Great Things About Getting Older. You Have Time For Your Friendships And You Appreciate Them In Ways That You Didn't Before.

If I Had To Guess What The New Etch-a-sketch Picture Is Going To Be Like, It's Going To Be Considerably Less To The Right. Romney Has Backed Himself Into A Couple Of Corners That I Don't Think Will Serve Him Well In The General Election, The Main One Being Very Harsh Stands On Immigration, Which I Think Are Not Only Short-sighted But To My Mind Immoral.

The Absence On The Panel Of Anyone Who Could Become Pregnant Accidentally Or Discover Her Salary Was Five Thousand Dollars A Yearless Than That Of Her Male Counterpart Meant There Was A Hole In The Consciousness Of The Committee That Empathy, However Welcome, Could Not Entirely Fill.

I Haven't Seen So Much Tippy-toeing Around Since The Last Time I Went To The Ballet. When Members Of The Arts Community Were Askedthis Week About One Of Their Biggest Benefactors, Philip Morris, And Its Requests That They Lobby The New York City Council On The Company's Behalf, The Pas De Deux Of Self- Justification Was So Painstakingly Choreographed That It Constituted A Performance All By Itself.

The Cairo Conferenceis About A Complicated Web Of Education And Employment, Consumption And Poverty, Development And Health Care. It Is Also About Whether Governments Will Follow Where Women Have So Clearly Led Them, Toward Safe, Simple And Reliable Choices In Family Planning. While Cairo Crackles With Conflict, In The Homes Of The World The Orthodoxies Have Been Duly Heard, And Roundly Ignored.

Well, We Tell Our Kids Things Like 'don't Gossip' And Then An Hour Later They Hear Us On The Phone. Stuff Like That.

I Do Think That People Who Are Now In Their Sixties And Their Seventies Are Living A Different Kind Of Life Than Their Grandparents Led, Even In These Tough Times. A Lot Of Them Are More Active, A Lot Of Them Are Still Working, Which Was Not The Case When Our Grandparents Were In Their Sixties.

Women Who Marry Early Are Often Overly Enamored Of The Kind Of Man Who Looks Great In Wedding Pictures And Passes The Maid Of Honor His Telephone Number.

Now, A Lot Of People Are Challenged By The Fact That A Record Number Of People In Their Sixties Have Living Parents, And A Record Number Of People In Their Sixties Have Kids Who May Still Depend Upon Them.

Over The Last Twenty Years, We've Changed The World Just Enough To Make It Radically Different, But Not Enough To Make It Work.

My Child Looked At Me And I Looked Back At Him In The Delivery Room, And I Realized That Out Of A Sea Of Infinite Possibilities It Had Come Down To This: A Specific Person, Born On The Hottest Day Of The Year, Conceived On A Christmas Eve, Made By His Father And Me Miraculously From Scratch.

Ideas Are Like Pizza Dough, Made To Be Tossed Around.

In Life, The Classroom Is Everywhere. The Exam Comes At The Very End.

Even As We Enumerate Their Shortcomings, The Rigor Of Raising Children Ourselves Makes Clear To Us Our Mothers' Incredible Strength. We Fear Both. If They Are Not Strong, Who Will Protect Us? If They Are Not Imperfect, How Can We Equal Them?

So You're Getting Squeezed At Both Sides. You're Taking Care Of Your Mom And Dad And You're Still Doing Caregiving With Your Kids, Which Is Not Easy. But I Think Overall, There's A Level Of Satisfaction That Might Be Unparalleled.

I Learned That If I Ever Claim Sexual Harassment, I Will Be Confronted With Every Bozo I Once Dated, Every Women I Once Impressedas Snotty And Superior, And Together They Will Provide A Convenient Excuse To Disbelieve Me.

You Realize That These Accidental Decisions You Make About Changing Jobs, About Moving Into An Apartment Where You Make New Friends And Confidants, About Going To One City Over Another, That Sometimes They're Completely Arbitrary Decisions That You Haven't Put As Much Thought Into As Perhaps You Should Have, And Yet They Change The Course Of Your Whole Life.

Decisions You Make

I Am An Affirmative Action Hire.

Affirmative Action

I Do Tend To Be Almost Kind Of Pollyanna-ish Person.

If God Is Watching Us, As Some Believers Suggest, As Though We Were A Television Show And God Had A Lot Of Free Time, The Deity Would Surely Be Bemused By How Dumbed-down Devotion Has Sometimes Become In This So-called Modern Era. How Might An Omnipotent Being With The Long View Of History Respond To Those Who Visit The Traveling Exhibit Of A Grilled-cheese Sandwich, Sold On Ebay, That Is Said To Bear The Image Of The Virgin Mary? It Certainly Argues Against Intelligent Design, Or At Least Intelligent Design In Humans.

Cheese Sandwiches

The Unemployment Rate Among The Young In The United States Is Still Very Disconcerting, Although We All Know It's Nowhere Near As Bad As It Is In Some Of The European Countries, Where In Some Places It Approaches 50 Percent.

I Think The Gift Of My Mother's Death, If Anything So Terrible Can Be Said To Have An Upside To It, Is That I Was Always Keenly Aware That Life Was Fleeting, And That You'd Better Live While You Have The Chance. As I Say In The Book, Since I Was 19 Years Old I Felt Like I Was Living For Two, And When I Out-lived My Mother, When I Got Into My Forties, It Felt Like A Miracle To Me.

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.

Since The Age Of Five I Had Been One Of Those People Who Was An Indefatigable Reader, More Inclined To Go Off By Myself With A Book Than Do Any Of The Dozens Of Things That Children Usually Do To Amuse Themselves. I Never Aged Out Of It.

So Much Of What You Take For Granted Is The Bedrock Of Happiness.

I Can't Think Of Anything To Write About Except Families. They Are A Metaphor For Every Other Part Of Society.

If We Really Feel Like We're Comfortable In Our Own Skins Now, We Have A Longer Period Of Time To Live Out That Kind Of Third Or Fourth Act Of Our Life.

Ideas Are Like Pizza Dough, Made To Be Tossed Around, And Nearly Every Book Represents What My Son's Third Grade Teacher Refers To As A "teachable Moment.

Writing Seems To Be The Only Profession People Imagine You Can Do By Thinking About Doing It.

One Of The Interesting Things I Discovered, Talking About Your Grandmother, Is I Did A Search Of My Uses Of The Word "elderly" In My Copy Over The Years, And You Will Not Be Surprised To Hear That The Older I Got The Less Often I Used The Word Elderly In Print.

I Think When People Keep Saying To You, "you're Good At This," You Just Keep Doing It.

I Did Not Read From A Sense Of Superiority, Or Advancement, Or Even Learning. I Read Because I Loved It More Than Any Other Activity On Earth.

Prosecutors Insist They Are Mounting A "thorough Investigation," Which Sometimes Means Thorough And Sometimes, Historically, Has Meant Long Enough To Let The Fire Burn Down In An Incendiary Case. A Thorough Investigation Is Fine; An Interminable One Is Disgraceful.

Reading Is Another Thing That Has Made Me More Human By Exposing Me To Worlds I Might Never Have Entered And People I Might Never Meet.

I Got A Fortune Cookie That Said, "to Remember Is To Understand." I Have Never Forgotten It. A Good Judge Remembers What It Was Like To Be A Lawyer. A Good Editor Remembers Being A Writer. A Good Parent Remembers What It Was Like To Be A Child.

We Read In Bed Because Reading Is Halfway Between Life And Dreaming, Our Own Consciousness In Someone Else's Mind.

A Safety Net Of Small White Lies Can Be The Bedrock Of A Successful Marriage. You Wouldn't Believe How Cheaply I Can Do A Kitchen Renovation.

It's Important To Remember That Feminism Is No Longer A Group Of Organizations Or Leaders. It's The Expectations That Parents Have For Their Daughters, And Their Sons, Too. It's The Way We Talk About And Treat One Another. It's Who Makes The Money And Who Makes The Compromises And Who Makes Dinner. It's A State Of Mind. It's The Way We Live Now.

Obama Doesn't Seem Like A Burger And A Beer Kind Of Guy. I Have To Say, I Don't Find That Problematic At All.

The Thing That Is Really Hard, And Really Amazing, Is Giving Up On Being Perfect And Beginning The Work Of Becoming Yourself.

It Would Take A Helluva Man To Replace No Man At All.

If You Want To Write What The World Is About, You Have To Write Details...real Life Is In The Dishes. Real Life Is Pushing Strollers Up The Street, Folding T-shirts, The Alarm Clock Going Off Early And You Dropping Into Bed Exhausted Every Night. That's Real Life.

I Know That It's Very Dispiriting For People In Their Twenties, Who Expected To Graduate From College, Get Their Own Apartments, Get A Job, And Move Forward With Their Lives, And In Fact Are Still Now Living With Mom And Dad, Which Is Challenging For All Involved.

It Is So Easy To Waste Our Lives: Our Days, Our Hours, Our Minutes. It Is So Easy To Take For Granted The Pale New Growth On An Evergreen, The Sheen Of The Limestone On Fifth Avenue, The Colour Of Our Kids’ Eyes, The Way The Melody In A Symphony Rises And Falls And Disappears And Rises Again. It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live. Unless You Know There Is A Clock Ticking.

The Greatest Public Health Threat For Many American Women Is The Men They Live With.

It Is Difficult For Me To Imagine The Same Dedication To Women's Rights On The Part Of The Kind Of Man Who Lives In Partnership With Someone He Likes And Respects, And The Kind Of Man Who Considers Breast-augmentation Surgery Self-improvement.

There's Some Muscle Group Around Your Shoulders That Seizes Up During The Perfection Dance And Doesn't Let Go Until You Are Asleep, Or Alone. Or Maybe It Never Really Lets Go At All.

All The Things We Don’t Say, All The Words We Swallow, And It Makes Nothing But Trouble.

But Never Fear, Gentlemen; Castration Was Really Not The Point Of Feminism, And We Women Are Too Busy Eviscerating One Another To Take You On.

The Church Does An Enormous Amount Of Good, And It Carries One Of The Most Valuable Messages Imaginable - That You Should Love Your Neighbor As Yourself, And That If You Have Two Coats You Should Give One To The Man Who Has None.

After All Those Years As A Woman Hearing 'not Thin Enough, Not Pretty Enough, Not Smart Enough, Not This Enough, Not That Enough,' Almost Overnight I Woke Up One Morning And Thought, 'i'm Enough.'

Life Is Not So Much About Beginnings And Endings As It Is About Going On And On And On. It Is About Muddling Through The Middle.

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.

Being Accused Of Making Money By Selling Sex In Hollywood, Home Of The Casting Couch And The Gratuitous Nude Scene, Is So Rich With Irony That It's A Better Subject For A Comic Novel Than A Column.... On One Coast The Cops Are Busting Sex Workers On Eighth Avenue, Dragging Them Downtown To Night Court Where They Pay The Fine And Go Right Back To Their Corner; On Another They're Charging Heidi Fleiss With Pandering In A Town In Which The Verb Is An Art Form.

There Are Obvious Places In Which Government Can Narrow The Chasm Between Haves And Have-nots. One Is The Public Schools, Which Have Been Seen As The Great Leveler, The Authentic Melting Pot. That, Today, Is Nonsense. In His Scathing Study Of The Nation's Public School System Entitled "savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol Made Manifest The Truth: That We Have A System That Discriminates Against The Poor In Everything From Class Size To Curriculum.

You Cannot Be Really First-rate At Your Work If Your Work Is All You Are.

Stereotypes Fall In The Face Of Humanity. You Toodle Along, Thinking That All Gay Men Wear Leather After Dark And Should Never, Ever Be Permitted Around A Little League Field. And Then One Day Your Best Friend From College, The One Your Kids Adore, Comes Out To You.

I Feel About Exercise The Same Way That I Feel About A Few Other Things: That There Is Nothing Wrong With It If It Is Done In Private By Consenting Adults.

Predictions That Unit Cohesion Could Not Survive Honesty About Sexual Orientation Were Simply Wrong. What Does Threaten Morale Arethe Prolonged Investigations, The Questioning Of Friends And Co-workers, The Searches Of Barracks For Magazines And Letters, The Witch Hunts.

This Is Why I Had Children: To Offer Them A Perfect Dream Of Childhood That Can Fill Their Souls As They Grow Older.

I Grew Up In The Suburbs Of Philadelphia And One Of The Things I Like To Say Is That One Of The Biggest Impediments I Had To Becoming A Successful Writer Is I Had A Very Happy Childhood.

I Think A Lot Of People, But Particularly A Lot Of Women, Get To This Stage When I'd Say They're Over 50. We Face A Lot Of Hard Judgment From The World, We Women. If You're A Full-time Mother, You Should Be Out Working. If You're Out Working, Your Kids Must Be Being Overlooked.

Here Is The Real Domino Theory - Gay Man To Gay Man, Bisexual Man To Straight Woman, Addict Mother To Newborn Baby, They All Fall Down And Someday It Will Come To You.

In A Democratic Society, The Only Treason Is Silence.

You're Like A Cake When You're Young. You Can't Rush It Or It Will Fall, Or Just Turn Out Wrong. Rising Takes Patience, And Heat.

When I Write A Novel, I Have What I Think Of As An Icon That Helps Get Me Into The World Of The Book.

I'm Writing This Memoir From The Perspective Of Somebody Who's Prosperous And Has Means. Having Said That, One Of The Things That I Think I Discovered About Those Additional Years Is That I Don't Think They Really Are Added To The End Of Life.

The Difference Between Government And Leadership Is That Leadership Has A Soul.

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.

The Great Motherhood Friendships Are The Ones In Which Two Women Can Admit [how Difficult Mothering Is] Quietly To Each Other, Over Cups Of Tea At A Table Sticky With Spilled Apple Juice And Littered With Markers Without Tops.

There's Something Undeniable About The Posture Of A Person Trying Not To Acknowledge Your Existance

I Hope Readers Will Do What I Do When I Read A Novel I Like: Talk In Ways That Will Illuminate Their Own Lives.

The Issue Is Privacy. Why Is The Decision By A Woman To Sleep With A Man She Has Just Met In A Bar A Private One, And The Decision To Sleep With The Same Man For $100 Subject To Criminal Penalties?

The Misdeeds Of Ordinary Men Can Be Buried With Them, And Their Lives Described In Half-truths That Are Really Half-lies. But Not A Public Man. Particularly Not This One.

I Think That After A While You Realize That Your Husband Can't Be All Things To You And Certainly You Don't Want The Kids To Be All Things To You, Because That Would Be A Terrible Weight For Them; And That Where You Really Find Solace A Lot Of The Time Is With Your Girlfriends.

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.

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.

Raising Children Is A Spur-of-the-moment, Seat-of-the-pants Sort Of Deal, As Any Parent Knows, Particularly After An Adult Child Says That His Most Searing Memory Consists Of An Offhand Comment In The Car On The Way To Second Grade That The Parent Cannot Even Dimly Recall.

While Liberals Had Embraced Obama As Someone Who Had Left-wing Progressive Ideas, The Truth Is That By Personality He's A Very Incremental Guy.

Grief Remains One Of The Few Things That Has The Power To Silence Us.

New York City Has Finally Hired Women To Pick Up The Garbage, Which Makes Sense To Me, Since, As I've Discovered, A Good Bit Of Being A Woman Consists Of Picking Up Garbage.

All Of Us Want To Do Well. But If We Do Not Do Good, Too, Then Doing Well Will Never Be Enough.

You Can Get Rid Of The Column. It's A Little Like Staying At A Hotel; You Get Used To The Shape Of The Room, And Then You're Gone. With A Novel You Move Into Town And Stay For A Long Time. That's Both Comforting And Terrifying.

I Have A Cat, The Pet That Ranks Just Above A Throw Pillow In Terms Of Required Responsibility.

Familiarity Breeds Content.

Acts Of Bravery Don't Always Take Place On Battlefields. They Can Take Place In Your Heart, When You Have The Courage To Honor Your Character, Your Intellect, Your Inclinations, And Yes, Your Soul By Listening To Its Clean, Clear Voice Of Direction Instead Of Following The Muddied Messages Of A Timid World.

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.

People Always Blame The Girl; She Should Have Said No. A Monosyllable, But Conventional Wisdom Has Always Been That Boys Can't Manage It.

The Women Of My Mother's Generation Had, In The Main, Only One Decision To Make About Their Lives: Who They Would Marry. From That, So Much Else Followed: Where They Would Live, In What Sort Of Conditions, Whether They Would Be Happy Or Sad Or, So Often, A Bit Of Both. There Were Roles And There Were Rules.

Jail Sentences Have Many Functions, But One Is Surely To Send A Message About What Our Society Abhors And What It Values. This Week, The Equation Was Twofold: Female Infidelity Twice As Bad As Male Abuse, The Life Of A Woman Half As Valuable As That Of A Man. The Killing Of The Woman Taken In Adultery Has A Long History And Survives Today In Many Cultures. One Of Those Is Our Own.

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.

Get A Life In Which You Notice The Smell Of Salt Water Pushing Itself On A Breeze Over The Dunes, A Life In Which You Stop And Watch How A Red-tailed Hawk Circles Over A Pond And A Stand Of Pines. Get A Life In Which You Pay Attention To The Baby As She Scowls With Concentration When She Tried To Pick Up A Cheerio With Her Thumb And First Finger.

The Statue Of Liberty Is Meant To Be Shorthand For A Country So Unlike Its Parts That A Trip From California To Indiana Should Require A Passport.

Raising A Child Is A Little Like Picasso's Work; In The Beginning He Did Very Conventional Representational Things. Cubism Came After He Had The Rules Down Pat.

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.

Americans Like Warm Characters. It's Why, No Matter What He Did In The Early Days, They Kind Of Resonated To Bill Clinton Because He Seems Like A Guy That You Could Sit Down And Have A Burger And A Beer With. It's Even Why, Despite The Fact That He Sometimes Seemed To Be Not Firing On All Cylinders, Lots Of Them Still Like George W. Bush - Because He Seemed Like The Kind Of Guy You Could Have A Burger And A Beer With.

When You Look At The Women That Have Made A Real Difference In The World Throughout History, What They’ve Done Has Almost Always Been Defined By Fearlessness. That’s Something I Came To At A Certain Point; I Wish I’d Come To It Younger. Stop Looking Over Your Shoulder — There’s Nobody Who Matters Back There.

When You Really Want To Say No, Say No. You Can't Do Everything - Or At Least Not Well.

Down Time Is Where We Become Ourselves... A Hiatus That Passes For Boredom But Is Really The Quiet Moving Of The Wheels Inside That Fuel Creativity.

The Voices Of Conformity Speak So Loudly. Don't Listen To Them. No One Does The Right Thing Out Of Fear. If You Ever Utter The Words, 'we've Always Done It That Way,' I Urge You To Wash Out Your Mouth With Soap.

In The Family Sandwich, The Older People And The Younger Ones Can Recognize One Another As The Bread. Those In The Middle Are, For A Time, The Meat.

Well, I'd Like To Think I Am, And I'd Also Like To Think That We're All Having A Lot More Fun Getting Older Than We Pretend. It Was Interesting To Me When I First Started Working On This Book That I'd Mentioned That I Was Writing A Memoir About Aging And Everybody Would Moan And Groan And Carry On.

The Dark Aftermath Of The Frontier, Of The Vast Promise Of Possibility This Country First Offered, Is An Inflated Sense Of American Entitlement Today. We Want What We Want, And We Want It Now. Easy Credit. Fast Food. A Straight Shot Down The Interstate From Point A To Point B. The Endless Highway Is Crowded With The Kinds Of Cars Large Enough To Take A Mountain Pass In High Snow. Instead They Are Used To Take Children From Soccer Practice To Pizza Hut. In The Process They Burn Fuel Like There's No Tomorrow. Tomorrow's Coming.

The Problem With Freedom Is That You Just Can't Go Back. Once People See What It Means To Be Free People, You Can't Go Back. So They're Going To Keep Nattering On About This And That, And Maybe They'll Make Another Stab At De-funding The Fabulous Planned Parenthood Or Something Of The Sort. To My Mind, It's Just Not Going To Work.

I Always Wanted To Be A Fiction Writer, But I Couldn't Figure Out How You Could Be A Novelist And Make Any Money, Which Continues To Be A Problem For Novelists The World Over.

I Will Never Understand People Who Think That The Way To Show Their Righteous Opposition To Sexual Freedom Is To Write Letters Full Of Filthy Words.

I Think One Of The Hardest Things About Doing A Book In The First Person Is That To A Certain Extent Each Day, When You Begin To Do Your Work, You're Climbing Into Somebody Else's Skin.

And Yet We Constantly Reclaim Some Part Of That Primal Spontaneity Through The Youngest Among Us, Not Only Through Their Sorrow And Anger But Simply Through Everyday Discoveries, Life Unwrapped. To See A Child Touch The Piano Keys For The First Time, To Watch A Small Body Slice Through The Surface Of The Water In A Clean Dive, Is To Experience The Shock, Not Of The New, But Of The Familiar Revisited As Though It Were Strange And Wonderful.

If You Want Something, It Will Elude You. If You Do Not Want Something, You Will Get Ten Of It In The Mail.

Books Are The Plane, And The Train, And The Road. They Are The Destination, And The Journey. They Are Home.

My Home Was In A Pleasant Place Outside Of Philadelphia. But I Really Lived, Truly Lived, Somewhere Else. I Lived Within The Covers Of Books.

Sometimes I Remind Myself That I Almost Skipped The Party, That I Almost Went To A Different College, That The Whim Of A Minute Could Have Changed Everything And Everyone. Our Lives, So Settled, So Specific, Are Built On Happenstance.

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.

Ask Any Woman How She Makes It Through The Day, And She May Mention Her Calendar, Her To-do Lists, Her Babysitter. But If You Push Her On How She Really Makes It Through Her Day, She Will Mention Her Girlfriends.

You Teach Your 16-year-old With Your Heart In Your Mouth To Be A Good Driver And None Of That Makes Any Difference When Some Drunk Comes Around A Corner And Runs A Stop Sign.

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.

Life Is So Messy That The Temptation To Straighten It Up Is Very Strong. And The Results Always Illusory.

I Learned To Live Many Years Ago. Something Really, Really Bad Happened To Me, Something That Changed My Life In Ways That, If I Had My Druthers, It Would Never Have Been Changed At All. What I Learned From It Is That Today Seems To Be The Hardest Lesson Of All. I Learned To Love The Journey, Not The Destination. I Learned That It Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, And That Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get. I Learned To Look At All The Good In The World And To Try To Give Some Of It Back Because I Believed In It Completely And Utterly.

The Separation Of Church And State Grew Out Of A Desire, Not So Much To Protect Government From Religion, But To Protect Religion From Government.

When I'm Falling, My Girlfriends Are My Soft Landing.

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.

If I Get The Forty Additional Years Statisticians Say Are Likely Coming To Me, I Could Fit In At Least One, Maybe Two New Lifetimes. Sad That Only One Of Those Lifetimes Can Include Being The Mother Of Young Children.

The World Is Full Of Women Blindsided By The Unceasing Demands Of Motherhood, Still Flabbergasted By How A Job Can Be Terrific Andtorturous, Involving And Utterly Tedious, All At The Same Time. The World Is Full Of Women Made To Feel Strange Because What Everyone Assumes Comes Naturally Is So Difficult To Do--never Mind To Do Well.

At The Same Time That You've Got To Open Yourself Up To The Fact That Experience Is Going To Teach You Year After Year, Decade After Decade. I Remember I Very Badly Wanted To Write A Newspaper Column When I Was Only 21 Years Old, And I Went To My Editor And Told Him That, And He Said, "you're A Really Good Writer, But You Haven't Lived Long Enough To Be Qualified To Live Out Loud."

When Children Are Small, Parents Should Run Their Lives And Not The Other Way Around.

When Men Do The Dishes, It's Called Helping. When Women Do The Dishes, It Is Called Life.

In Books I Have Traveled, Not Only To Other Worlds, But Into My Own.

I Once Wanted To Be A Personage. Now I Am Comfortable Being A Person.

Your Children Make It Impossible To Regret Your Past. They're Its Finest Fruits. Sometimes The Only Ones.

The New Testament Has Had A Really Powerful Effect On How I Write And How I Live My Life.

The Future Is Built On Brains, Not Prom Court, As Most People Can Tell You After Attending Their High School Reunion. But You'd Never Know It By Talking To Kids Or Listening To The Messages They Get From The Culture And Even From Their Schools.

I Think At Every Moment In The Last Probably 100 Years, When The Institutional Church Had The Opportunity To Do The Right Thing, They Did The Wrong Thing. They're A Dying Institution In Many Parts Of The World Because They Refuse To Ordain Women Or Married People. And Now They're A Dying Institution Because Some Of Their Members Did Enormous Harm To Young People And Instead Of Responding Aggressively With Humility, And With Love, And With The Confession Of Wrongdoing, They Tried To Spin It As Though They Were A Political Party, And That's Just Deplorable.

We've Made Hyper Motherhood A Measure Of Female Success.

The Best Thing About Sassy Seats Is That Grandmothers Cannot Figure Out How They Work And Are In Constant Fear Of The Child's Falling. This Often Makes Them Forget To Comment On Other Aspects Of The Child's Development, Like Why He Is Not Yet Talking Or Is Still Wearing Diapers. Some Grandmothers Will Spend An Entire Meal Peering Beneath The Table And Saying, "is That Thing Steady?" Rather Than, "have You Had A Doctor Look At That Left Hand?

I Think We Now Know The Limits Also Of Intelligence And Rhetoric.

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.

There Are A Million Moving Parts To Raising Kids, And You Can't Always Anticipate Them All, Especially When They Are Teenagers And Their Peers Play Such A Huge Role In Their Lives. If You Offer Independence, There Is One Kind Of Pitfall; If You Shelter Them Too Much, There Is Another. And Sometimes You Do Everything Right And Something Bad Just Happens. It's As Simple, And As Scary, As That.

Maybe I Had Three Children In The First Place So I Wouldn't Ever Have To Play Board Games. In My Religion, Martyrs Die.

A Life Of Unremitting Caution, Without The Carefree - Or Even, Occasionally, The Careless - May Turn Out To Be Half A Life.

And I Don't Have To Listen To A Sermon To Know What To Think Or Feel About Them. It's Almost As If I Absorbed Completely What Mattered Most To Me, And The Rest Could Go.

And A Great Misunderstanding Is That Children Think Their Parents Are Grown-up, And Parents Feel Obliged To Act As If They Were.

For Most Of My Life The Only Ceremonies I've Been To At Which Women Were The Stars Were Weddings. So I Like Weddings.

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.

Get A Life. A Real Life. Not A Manic Pursuit Of The Next Promotion, The Bigger Paycheck, The Larger House.

What Had I Expected Of The First Child? Everything. Rocket Scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated Hitter. We Talked Wisely At Cocktail Parties About The Sad Mistake Our Mothers Had Made In Pinning All Their Hopes And Dreams On Us. We Were Full Of It.

You Write To Suit Some Sense In Yourself And Trust That That Will Resonate With A Certain Wider Readership.

The Victim Mentality May Be The Last Uncomplicated Thing About Life In America.

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.

You Want To Have Fun With Your Kids, And No One Has Fun With Someone Who Runs Roughshod.

All Reading Is Good Reading. And All Reading Of Jane Austen And Charles Dickens Is Sublime Reading.

I Never Think About Issues When I'm Working On A Novel. Issues Are Things That Happen To People In Sufficient Numbers To Elicit Widespread Attention; In Other Words, They're Just Life Happening. That's What I Think About: Life, And Telling A Story.

If God Had Meant Harvard Professors To Appear In People Magazine, She Wouldn't Have Invented The New York Review Of Books.

Consider The Lilies Of The Field. Look At The Fuzz On A Baby's Ear. Read In The Backyard With The Sun On Your Face. Learn To Be Happy. And Think Of Life As A Terminal Illness Because If You Do You Will Live It With Joy And Passion, As It Ought To Be Lived.

I Don't Understand How People Learn To Live In The World If They Haven't Had Siblings. Everything I Learned About Negotiation, Territoriality, Coexistence, Dislike, Inbred Differences And Love Despite Knowledge I Learned From My Four Younger Siblings.

My Father Really, Really Pushed Me To Excel In A Way That I Resented For Years And Then Realized Had Really Worked For Me.

Ignorant Free Speech Often Works Against The Speaker. That Is One Of Several Reasons Why It Must Be Given Rein Instead Of Suppressed.

By The Time You Kill And Mount What You Catch, It Has Lost That Very Thing That Made It Worth Having. I Knew This Only As A Vague Sense Of Disappointment At Age 10; Not Until Later Did I Recognize It As A Metaphor For Much Of Life.

It Often Seems, Looking Back, That The Unexpected Comes To Define Us, The Paths We Didn't See Coming And May Have Wandered Down By Mistake. The Older We Get The More Willing We Are To Follow Those, To Surprise Ourselves.

When You Leave College, There Are Thousands Of People Out There With The Same Degree You Have; When You Get A Job, There Will Be Thousands Of People Doing What You Want To Do For A Living. But You Are The Only Person Alive Who Has Sole Custody Of Your Life.

Choose The Kids. There Will Be Plenty Of Time Later To Choose Work.

It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live.

I Go Online All The Time, I Just Don't Read About Myself. I Read A Fashion Website Called Go Fug Yourself. I Actually Correspond With The Fug Girls And That's Great.

There's A Certain Kind Of Conversation You Have From Time To Time At Parties In New York About A New Book. The Word "banal" Sometimes Rears Its By-now Banal Head; You Say "underedited," I Say "derivative." The Conversation Goes Around And Around Various Literary Criticisms, And By The Time It Moves On One Thing Is Clear: No One Read The Book; We Just Read The Reviews.

There Are Those Of Us Who Believe That Under Certain Conditions The Cruelest Thing You Can Do To People You Love Is To Force Them To Live. There Are Those Of Us Who Define Living Not By Whether The Heart Beats And The Lungs Lift But Whether The Spirit Is There, Whether The Music Box Plays.

Figuring Out Who You Are Is The Whole Point Of The Human Experience.

Look Around At The Azaleas Making Fuchsia Star Bursts In Spring; Look At A Full Moon Hanging Silver In A Black Sky On A Cold Night. And Realize That Life Is Glorious, And That You Have No Business Taking It For Granted.

No One Thinks Anything Silly Is Suitable When They Are An Adolescent. Such An Enormous Share Of Their Own Behavior Is Silly That They Lose All Proper Perspective On Silliness, Like A Baker Who Is Nauseated By The Sight Of His Own Eclairs. This Provides Another Good Argument For The Emerging Theory That The Best Use Of Cryogenics Is To Freeze All Human Beings When They Are Between The Ages Of Twelve And Nineteen.

My Mother Was An Incredibly Loving Mother.

The 1992 Us Olympic Basketball Team Is The Best Sports Team Ever, The Equivalent Of Rounding Up The Greatest American Writers Of The Last Century Or So And Watching Them Collaborate: 'ok, Twain, You Do The Dialogue And Hand Off To Faulkner. He'll Do The Interior Monologue. Hemingway Will Edit - No, Don't Make That Face, You Know You Overwrite. And Be Nice To Cheever. He's Young, But He's Got A Good Ear. Wharton And Cather Can't Play - They're Girls.'

On The Other Hand, I Think That Governor Romney Has To Worry That His Turnout Is Going To Be Low, That He Is Not Going To Bring Out The Evangelicals, That He Is Not Going To Bring Out The Tea Party Stalwarts. If He Does Not, Then It's Pretty Clear That He Will Lose The Election. So I Think Turnout In Key Groups Is Going To Be Really, Really Key On Election Day.

Novels Are Usually Built On Conflict, Sometimes Very, Very Difficult Conflict. It's Why Men Write War Novels - Because There You Go, There's The Conflict Writ Large.

For Many Years, Despite What I Thought Were Really Punitive Decisions About Women In The Church, I Stayed And Stayed And Stayed. I Kept Saying To Myself, "the Catholic Church Is My Church, And By God, I'm Going To Stay Here, Despite What The Hierarchy Does."

My Sister Is A Public School Teacher. She Makes Far Far Less Money Than I Do, And Gets Almost No Public Attention For Her Work. Yet I Believe What She Does Is Infinitely More Important And More Difficult Than What I Do.

The Truth About Your Own Life Is Not Always Easy To Accept, And Sometimes Hasn't Even Occurred To You.

A Writer Is Always Working With Whatever She's Managed To Store In The Brainpan Or Puzzle Out About The World.

People Ask Me All The Time If I'm From A Family Of Writers. The Literal Short Answer Is No, But My Father And His Brothers And Sisters And His Mother Are All People Who Would Sit Around With A Tom Collins And Tell Stories That Seemed To Get Better And Better Each Time They Told Them.

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.

I Think The Very Best Thing About The Internet Is That I Can Read All The London Papers Every Day If I Want To.

I Know A Lot And Have Written A Lot And Have Thought A Lot About Motherhood.

The Joy Of Someone Who Had Been A Reader All Her Life, Whose World Had Been Immeasurably Enlarged By The Words Of Others.

I Do Think There's Some Aspect Of Being A Novelist That Is A Little Crazy Making.

That Is Supposed To Be The Rallying Cry Of Women In The Age Of Aids: No Condom, No Sex. But The Dirty Little Secret Is That The Rallying Cry Is A Whisper.... The Great Unspoken On The Heterosexual Aids Front Has Been How Behavior Is Still Determined By The Old Psychosexual Minuet Of The Sexes, The Lack Of Responsibility In Young Men And Of Assertiveness In Young Women.

It's Only Before Realities Set In That We Can Treasure Our Delusions.

I Was Doing The Family Grocery Shopping Accompanied By Two Children, An Event I Hope To See Included In The Olympics In The Near Future.

That's Really What I Want In A Leader; I Want Somebody Who's Really, Really Smart.

I Really Feel Like I'm A Liberal Because I'm A Catholic, Because I Took The Words Of The New Testament To Heart.

If I Waited Long Enough And Said, "okay, So What You're Saying Is You Liked Your Life A Lot Better When You Were 30?" Everybody Would Get Real Quiet And Then Admit That That Wasn't The Case, That They Really Felt Like They Were Sort Of Growing Into Themselves In A Way.

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.

I Really Feel Like If You Can Get Past Your Fear, If You Can Say, "uh-uh, I'm Afraid To Do That And I'm Going To Do It Anyhow," That That's Really The Way To Have A Satisfying Life Moving Forward. I Think I Had That Kind Of Fearlessness Even As A Young Person. It Wasn't Tempered By Experience Or Wisdom, But It Took Me A Long Way.

And Sometimes You Do Everything Right And Something Bad Just Happens. It's As Simple, And As Scary, As That.

Guilt Is What Separates Humans From Animals.

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.

Anyone Who Has Breast-fed Knows Two Things For Sure: The Baby Wants To Be Fed At The Most Inopportune Times, In The Most Inopportune Places, And The Baby Will Prevail.... And So The Baby Should, And The Mom, Too. Sometimes A Breast Is A Sexual Object, And Sometimes It's A Food Delivery System, And One Need Not Preclude Nor Color The Other.

If You Raise An Intelligent Girl She Will Become A Feminist Because Of The Facts Of Her Own Life. Raising Feminist Boys Is More Difficult. Raising Egalitarian Boys. One Of The Reasons You Have To Raise Them That Way Is Because It's Better For Them.

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Stanley Kubrick

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