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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
Cat
Cleanliness
Chaos
Bookstores
Demand
Cats
Monitors
Computer
Visit
Secondhand
Sleep
Sleeping
Housekeeping
Indifferent
Bookstore
Prefer
Rigorous
Sufficient
Organizational

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When I write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose
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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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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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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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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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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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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 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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Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
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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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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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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.
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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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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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If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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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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I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
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