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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

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Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Hands
Maps
Book
Tape
Vagrants
Take
Unknown
Scissors
Believe
Likely
Unreliable
Parts
Scotch
Unless
Strictly
Hand
Confined
Books
Quarters

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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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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
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I have never been able to resist a book about books.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
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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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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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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.
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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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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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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
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