Quote

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

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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
Thinking
Prefer
Absence
Forgotten
Merely
Commas
Source
Inverted
Thought
Originality
May
Guarantees
Think
Whereas

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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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Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
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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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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
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My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat
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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 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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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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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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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
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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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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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For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
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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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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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If you want to feel at home, stay home.
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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 take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.
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