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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.

Anne Fadiman

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Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Wrote
Sofa
Became
Refrigerator
Books
Sofas
Story
Refrigerators
Stories
Accumulated
Book
Underneath
Life
Shelves
Chapters

More quotes by Anne Fadiman

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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.
Anne Fadiman
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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
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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
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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
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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anne Fadiman
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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
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If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
Anne Fadiman
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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
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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
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 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
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When I write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose
Anne Fadiman
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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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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.
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
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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
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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
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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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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
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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Anne Fadiman