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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

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.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

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

...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.

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

E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.

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

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.

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

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

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

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.

...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.

You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?

Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good.

But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.