Quote

...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

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
Book
Symphony
Never
Shelves
Plucks
Listeners
Beethoven
Deprived
Pluck
Performance
Shelf
Performances
Attending
Reader
Listener
Single
Hears

More quotes by Anne Fadiman

Image
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
Image
Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
Anne Fadiman
Image
E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
Anne Fadiman
Image
If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
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
Image
I have never been able to resist a book about books.
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
Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
Anne Fadiman
Image
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
Image
Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
Anne Fadiman
Image
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
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
If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
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
When I write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose
Anne Fadiman
Image
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.
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
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
Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
Anne Fadiman