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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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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
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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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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 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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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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Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
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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.
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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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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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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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If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
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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 have never been able to resist a book about books.
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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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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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E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
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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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