Top 66 Anne Fadiman Quotes
#1. I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
Anne Fadiman
#2. To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed Pause.
Anne Fadiman
#3. It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
Anne Fadiman
#4. E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
Anne Fadiman
#5. I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
Anne Fadiman
#6. The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.
Anne Fadiman
#7. The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller.
Anne Fadiman
#8. Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
Anne Fadiman
#9. My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.
Anne Fadiman
#10. When I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says Private - grownups keep out: a children sprawled on the bed, reading.
Anne Fadiman
#11. Cultural humility acknowledges that doctors bring the baggage of their own cultures - their own ethnic backgrounds along with the culture of medicine - to the patient's bedside, and that these may not necessarily be superior.
Anne Fadiman
#12. Her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with
Anne Fadiman
#13. If you can't see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else's culture?
Anne Fadiman
#14. When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos ...
Anne Fadiman
#15. I would like to attribute my range of interests to being an independent intellectual, but although I'm independent, I'm not sure I qualify as an intellectual. Basically, I'm an old-fashioned amateur.
Anne Fadiman
#16. Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.
Anne Fadiman
#17. I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
Anne Fadiman
#18. A sonnet might look dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough.
Anne Fadiman
#20. In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Anne Fadiman
#21. We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.
Anne Fadiman
#22. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
Anne Fadiman
#23. If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.
Anne Fadiman
#24. The reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
Anne Fadiman
#25. The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
Anne Fadiman
#26. A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.
Anne Fadiman
#27. Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
Anne Fadiman
#28. Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story
Anne Fadiman
#29. You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
Anne Fadiman
#30. When I think of the causes for which people more commonly give up their lives-nationalism, religion, ethnicity-it seems to me that a thirty-five pound bag of rocks and the lost world it represents, is not such a bad thing to die for.
Anne Fadiman
#31. -our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.
Anne Fadiman
#32. The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture.
Anne Fadiman
#33. Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good.
Anne Fadiman
#34. A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness.
Anne Fadiman
#35. For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Anne Fadiman
#36. I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.
Anne Fadiman
#37. One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.
Anne Fadiman
#38. It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more.
Anne Fadiman
#39. High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners.
Anne Fadiman
#40. It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
Anne Fadiman
#41. I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice
at least in my reading
I'm un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day.
Anne Fadiman
#42. The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.
Anne Fadiman
#43. I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
#44. [The shells] do not have the meaning they once did, but, as Swann said in Remembrance of Things Past, "even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them." (22)
Anne Fadiman
#45. I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.
Anne Fadiman
#46. [T]here is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child.
Anne Fadiman
#47. When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.
Anne Fadiman
#48. Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
Anne Fadiman
#49. His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter.
Anne Fadiman
#50. It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.
Anne Fadiman
#51. My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak.
Anne Fadiman
#52. If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
Anne Fadiman
#53. If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering
naked and alone
Anne Fadiman
#54. It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.
Anne Fadiman
#55. But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.
Anne Fadiman
#56. You know Anne,' he said quietly, 'when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere.
Anne Fadiman
#57. You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?
Anne Fadiman
#58. ...in the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all first-time mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment.
Anne Fadiman
#59. -believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.
Anne Fadiman
#60. I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never "the hoi polloi," because hoi meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant
indeed something only hoi polloi would say.
Anne Fadiman
#61. Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
Anne Fadiman
#62. The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong. So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory.
Anne Fadiman
#63. As he leans over to kiss me good night, I do not regret having graduated from the amorous sprints of our youths. Marriage is a long-distance course, and reading aloud is a kind of romantic Gatorade formulated to invigorate the occasionally exhausted racers.
Anne Fadiman
#64. I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money.
Anne Fadiman
#65. George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know that you might as well be breaking my own spine.
Anne Fadiman
#66. One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [ ... ] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
Anne Fadiman
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