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

More quotes by Anne Fadiman

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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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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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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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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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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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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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If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.
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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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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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Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
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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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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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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
Anne Fadiman
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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anne Fadiman
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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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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 write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose
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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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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Anne Fadiman