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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.
Clifton Fadiman
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Clifton Fadiman
Age: 95 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 15
Died: 1999
Died: June 20
Intellectual
Journalist
Literary Critic
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Brooklyn
New York
Clifton Paul Fadiman
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Grandmother
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Longfellow
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More quotes by Clifton Fadiman
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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Being a child is in itself a profession.
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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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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 German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
Wine is poetry in a bottle.
Clifton Fadiman
One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
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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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For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
Clifton Fadiman
The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
Clifton Fadiman
To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.
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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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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
My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat
Clifton Fadiman
One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.
Clifton Fadiman
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
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.
Clifton Fadiman
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
