Anne Fadiman Quotes

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.

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, 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 child sprawled on the bed, reading.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.

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.

It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.

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.

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.

The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.

Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this story was told, everyone around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.

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.

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.

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.

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.

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.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.