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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
Heroic
Admire
Americans
Failure
Success
Englishmen
More quotes by Anne Fadiman
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
The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
Anne Fadiman
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
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
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
I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
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
I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
Anne Fadiman
If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
Anne Fadiman
When I write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose
Anne Fadiman
I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
Anne Fadiman
Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
Anne Fadiman
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
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
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Anne Fadiman
Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anne Fadiman
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
If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
Anne Fadiman
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
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