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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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Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Rather
Water
Book
Pinch
Instructions
Settle
Instruction
Settling

More quotes by 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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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Anne Fadiman
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I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
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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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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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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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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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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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 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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In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
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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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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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anne Fadiman
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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
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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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
Anne Fadiman