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Anne Fadiman Quotes | Quotes said by Anne Fadiman

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #1

    -believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.


  • Anne Fadiman Quote #2

    -our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #3

    ...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #4

    A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #5

    Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #6

    But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #7

    George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know that you might as well be breaking my own spine.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #8

    His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #9

    I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #10

    I have never been able to resist a book about books.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #11

    I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #12

    I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #13

    If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #14

    In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #15

    It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #16

    Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #17

    My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #18

    My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #19

    One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #20

    One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #21

    Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #22

    Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #23

    Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #24

    So, if you're a doctor, how can you recognize that you're having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn:
    Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen or excessive diaphoresis; anger may be manifested by a generalized muscle tightness or a clenching of the jaw; sexual arousal may be noted by a tingling of the loins or piloerection; and sadness may be felt by conjunctival injection or heaviness of the chest.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #25

    Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #26

    The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #27

    The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #28

    The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #29

    We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.

  • Anne Fadiman Quote #30

    You mean we're going chronological order within each author? he gasped. But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!
    Well, I blustered, we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I'd like to see that reflected on our shelves.
    George says that was one of the few times he has seriously contemplated divorce.

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