Anne Fadiman
11 quotes
Biography
"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."
"I have never been able to resist a book about books."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar."
"One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer."
"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."
"These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen."
"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. One of the pleasures, or horrors, of the direct-mail business is that you never know to whom your name will be pandered. My friend Ross Baughman, a photographer who once accompanied a group of American mercenaries to Nicaragua, inquired before the trip about a mail-order night-vision scope that would allow him to take pictures during midnight commando raids without using a flash. Ever since, he has been deluge with catalogs for pamphlets on how to make rifle silencers out of old car mufflers and napalm out of laundry detergent."
"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."