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

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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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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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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
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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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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
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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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I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
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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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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
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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.
Anne Fadiman
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If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
Anne Fadiman
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Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
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I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
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When I write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose
Anne Fadiman
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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
Anne Fadiman
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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
Anne Fadiman
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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.
Anne Fadiman
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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.
Anne Fadiman