Clifton Fadiman Quotes

If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover.

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.

Wine is poetry in a bottle.

The man who attracts luck carries with him the magnet of preparation.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.

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.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

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.

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.

To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

If you want to feel at home, stay home.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.

We are all citizens of history.

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.

Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.

[Books] will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as either transient acquaintances or permanent friends. They will stay as long as you like, departing or returning as you wish. Their friendship entails no obligation. Best of all, and not always true of our merely human friends, they have Cleopatra's infinite variety.

A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.