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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
Prefer
Rigorous
Sufficient
Organizational
Cat
Cleanliness
Chaos
Bookstores
Demand
Cats
Monitors
Computer
Visit
Secondhand
Sleep
Sleeping
Housekeeping
Indifferent
Bookstore
More quotes by Anne Fadiman
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.
Anne Fadiman
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
Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
Anne Fadiman
If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
Anne Fadiman
I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
Anne Fadiman
You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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
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
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 can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
Anne Fadiman
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
...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
The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
Anne Fadiman
E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
Anne Fadiman
Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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
Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
Anne Fadiman
If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
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
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
