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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
Existence
Socrates
Dark
Delivering
Often
Depths
Ideas
Depth
Book
Silent
Coiled
Great
Full
Embryo
Like
Called
Embryos
Brain
Midwife

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A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
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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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We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.
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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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The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
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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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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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Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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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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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
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We are all citizens of history.
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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
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Being a child is in itself a profession.
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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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To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.
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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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One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.
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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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