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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.

Anne Fadiman

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Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Less
Thank
Middlemarch
Nothing
Notes
Punctuality
Thing
Letters
Truism
Convinced
February
Wait
December
Example
Note
Written
Psychology
Waiting
Christmas

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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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Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
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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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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.
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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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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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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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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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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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For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
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Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
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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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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
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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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E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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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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The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
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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