Top 100 Fadiman Quotes
#1. From a footnote: Writes Clifton Fadiman: "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.
Michael Paterniti
#2. 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
#3. For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
Clifton Fadiman
#4. It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
Anne Fadiman
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.
Clifton Fadiman
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
Clifton Fadiman
#16. For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
Anne Fadiman
#17. A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness.
Anne Fadiman
#18. Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good.
Anne Fadiman
#19. 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
#20. -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
#21. 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
#22. Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn't know you knew.
Clifton Fadiman
#23. You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.
Anne Fadiman
#24. Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story
Anne Fadiman
#25. The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
#27. The man who attracts luck carries with him the magnet of preparation.
Clifton Fadiman
#28. 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
#29. If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering
naked and alone
Anne Fadiman
#30. My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat.
Clifton Fadiman
#31. If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
Anne Fadiman
#32. Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye,
particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.
Clifton Fadiman
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
Clifton Fadiman
#36. It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.
Anne Fadiman
#37. I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
Clifton Fadiman
#38. 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
#39. Liquor is not a necessity. It is a means of momentarily sidestepping necessity.
Clifton Fadiman
#40. Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
Anne Fadiman
#41. Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
Anne Fadiman
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. [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
#46. 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
#47. [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
#48. I have never been able to resist a book about books.
Anne Fadiman
#49. Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.
Clifton Fadiman
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.
Clifton Fadiman
#55. A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover
Clifton Fadiman
#56. Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Clifton Fadiman
#58. 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
#59. A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.
Clifton Fadiman
#60. By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.
Clifton Fadiman
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
Anne Fadiman
#66. Be kind to people whether they deserve your kindness or not. If your kindness reaches the deserving good for you if your kindness reaches the undeserving take joy in your compassion.
James Fadiman
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman
#71. 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
#72. E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
Anne Fadiman
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
Anne Fadiman
#77. In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Anne Fadiman
#78. The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
Anne Fadiman
#80. 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
#81. Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.
Clifton Fadiman
#82. 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
#83. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
Anne Fadiman
#84. I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.
Clifton Fadiman
#85. 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
#86. He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession.
Clifton Fadiman
#87. The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
Clifton Fadiman
#88. Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
Clifton Fadiman
#89. 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
#91. 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
#93. 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.
Clifton Fadiman
#94. I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
Anne Fadiman
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Humor is a bit like Mary Poppins' sugar-it helps the medicine go down. A little bit of humor allows people to think about very difficult subjects.
James Fadiman
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