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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

Anne Fadiman

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Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Way
Like
People
Enlarging
Learning
Literature

More quotes by Anne Fadiman

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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.
Anne Fadiman
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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.
Anne Fadiman
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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
Anne Fadiman
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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.
Anne Fadiman
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When I write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose
Anne Fadiman
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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.
Anne Fadiman
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Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
Anne Fadiman
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Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
Anne Fadiman
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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'.
Anne Fadiman
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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
Anne Fadiman
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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.
Anne Fadiman
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If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
Anne Fadiman
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I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
Anne Fadiman
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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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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
Anne Fadiman
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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.
Anne Fadiman
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Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anne Fadiman
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E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
Anne Fadiman
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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.
Anne Fadiman