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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
Book
Silent
Coiled
Great
Full
Embryo
Like
Called
Embryos
Brain
Midwife
Existence
Socrates

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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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Wine is poetry in a bottle.
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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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Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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We are all citizens of history.
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Being a child is in itself a profession.
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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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Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
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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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I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
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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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A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
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The drinking of wine seems to me to have a moral edge over many pleasures and hobbies in that it promotes love of one's neighbor.
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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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If you want to feel at home, stay home.
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My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat
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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's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.
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There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.
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