Quote

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.

Clifton Fadiman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Years
Tree
Rings
Divide
Consultation
Life
Courses
Dull
Traps
Tumble
Course
Trees
Arbitrary
Calendar
Grows
Permanent
Consent
Annuals
Existence
Carry
Divides
Annual
Earth
Sun
Unlike
Calendars
Need
Wall
Drawn
Arithmetic
Consents
Needs
Grow
Birthday
Trap
Timetables

More quotes by Clifton Fadiman

Image
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.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
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.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
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.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
We are all citizens of history.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
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.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
As between mileage and experience choose experience.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
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.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
Being a child is in itself a profession.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
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.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
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.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
There are two kinds of writers the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Clifton Fadiman