Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Desire
Aspiration
Extravagantly
Able
Closest
Bookcases
Self
Desires
Scanning
Vices
Fantasize
Taste
Aspirations
Brother
Selves
Parents
Tastes
Parent
Shelves
Snooping

More quotes by Anne Fadiman

Image
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
Image
E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
Anne Fadiman
Image
...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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anne Fadiman
Image
For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Anne Fadiman
Image
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
Image
If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
Anne Fadiman
Image
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
Image
I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
Anne Fadiman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
Anne Fadiman
Image
I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
Anne Fadiman
Image
It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
Anne Fadiman
Image
I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
Image
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Anne Fadiman