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

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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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Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
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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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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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My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat
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A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
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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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Wine is a civilizing agent.
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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
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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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Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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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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We are all citizens of history.
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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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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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Wine is poetry in a bottle.
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If you want to feel at home, stay home.
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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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I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
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