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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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Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Sleep
Sleeping
Housekeeping
Indifferent
Bookstore
Prefer
Rigorous
Sufficient
Organizational
Cat
Cleanliness
Chaos
Bookstores
Demand
Cats
Monitors
Computer
Visit
Secondhand

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I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
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E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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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.
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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.
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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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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 my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
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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.
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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.
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Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
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