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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
Wait
December
Example
Note
Written
Psychology
Waiting
Christmas
Less
Thank
Middlemarch
Nothing
Notes
Punctuality
Thing
Letters
Truism
Convinced
February

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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 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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...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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If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone
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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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I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
Anne Fadiman
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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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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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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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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Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
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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.
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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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
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.
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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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.
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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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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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