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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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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
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Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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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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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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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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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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Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
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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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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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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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I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
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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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I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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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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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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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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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
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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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