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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

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Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Book
Copyright
Well
Convenient
Things
Belongs
Despite
Reader
Writer
Literature
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Copyrights

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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.
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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.
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Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
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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.
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When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos.
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It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
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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.
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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.
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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Anne Fadiman
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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
Anne Fadiman
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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
Anne Fadiman
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In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
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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.
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I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
Anne Fadiman
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E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
Anne Fadiman
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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
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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