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Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

Clifton Fadiman

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Clifton Fadiman
Age: 95 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 15
Died: 1999
Died: June 20
Intellectual
Journalist
Literary Critic
Radio Personality
Television Presenter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Clifton Paul Fadiman
Dark
Delivering
Often
Depths
Ideas
Depth
Coiled
Book
Silent
Embryo
Great
Full
Embryos
Like
Called
Midwife
Brain
Existence
Socrates

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The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
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The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
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What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.
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One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
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One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
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For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
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Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
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To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
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My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don't want to be a pal, I want to be a father.
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When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
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I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
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Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
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A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.
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To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.
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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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Wine is a civilizing agent.
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Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
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There are two kinds of writers the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
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