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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

Anne Fadiman

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Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Englishmen
Heroic
Admire
Americans
Failure
Success

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Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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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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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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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
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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'.
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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
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I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
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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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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.
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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.
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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
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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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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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I have never been able to resist a book about books.
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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.
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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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