Anne Fadiman Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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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• 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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• When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.

  Anne Fadiman

  Children, Book, Reading

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.13, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed Pause.

  Anne Fadiman

  Book, Buttons, Use

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.39, Macmillan

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• Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

  Anne Fadiman

  Heroic, Admire, Englishmen

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.24, Macmillan

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• ...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 am very grateful to the electronic world for making my life easier, but there is something about holding a book - the smell and the world of association. Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love.

  Anne Fadiman

  Book, Grateful, Smell

  "Lust for words, and ice-cream too" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. November 25, 2007.

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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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• 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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• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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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• 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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