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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
Believe
Likely
Unreliable
Parts
Scotch
Unless
Strictly
Hand
Confined
Books
Quarters
Hands
Maps
Book
Tape
Vagrants
Take
Unknown
Scissors

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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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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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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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Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
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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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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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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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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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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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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
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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.
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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 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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When I write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose
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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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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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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
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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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