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

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Wine is poetry in a bottle.
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The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
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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 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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For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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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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Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
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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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A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
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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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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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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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Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.
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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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Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
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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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A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
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