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

More quotes by Anne Fadiman

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I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
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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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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.
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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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If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
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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.
Anne Fadiman
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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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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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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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It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
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Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
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.
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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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I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
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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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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You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
Anne Fadiman
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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.
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