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A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

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
Good
Trivial
Trained
Memory
Memories
Forget

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One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.
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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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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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Being a child is in itself a profession.
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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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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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Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
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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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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.
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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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As between mileage and experience choose experience.
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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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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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Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
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I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation
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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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We are all citizens of history.
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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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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
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