Anne Fadiman Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• ...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

  Book, Symphony, Shelves

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

  Anne Fadiman

  Book, Water, Settling

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.113, Macmillan

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• Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I'll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That's something I don't want to live to see.

  Anne Fadiman

  Book, Worry, Thank God

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• 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

  Brother, Self, Parent

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• 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

  Responsibility, Writing, Voice

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• 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

  Daughter, Baby, Philosophy

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.41, Macmillan

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• It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.

  Anne Fadiman

  Old Things, Waiting, Psychology

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• For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

  Anne Fadiman

  People, Literature, Way

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• 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

  Believe, Book, Scotch

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.4, Macmillan

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• 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

  Sleep, Writing, Cities

  Anne Fadiman (2008). “At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays”, p.73, Macmillan

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• If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.

  Anne Fadiman

  Girl, Father, Writing

  1998 On her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned man-ofletters. In Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.

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• 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 children sprawled on the bed, reading.

  Anne Fadiman

  Children, Book, Reading

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• E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.

  Anne Fadiman

  Cities, World, Letters

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• If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone

  Anne Fadiman

  Soul, Naked, Eternity

  Anne Fadiman (1998). “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures”, p.5, Macmillan

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