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

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Wine is a civilizing agent.
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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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I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
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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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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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Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
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I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
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Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
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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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A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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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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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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A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
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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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