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Top Anne Fadiman Quotes

Browse top 40 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Anne Fadiman.

Favorite Anne Fadiman Quotes

1. "I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never "the hoi polloi," because hoi meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say." ~ Anne Fadiman
2. "A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness." ~ Anne Fadiman
3. "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
4. "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
5. "You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before ou get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together is is like putting glue on a broken glass." ~ Anne Fadiman
6. "My life seems too fast now, so obstructions bother me less than they once did. I am no longer in a hurry to see what is around the next bend. I find myself wanting to backferry, to hover midstream, suspended. If I could do that, I might avoid many things: harsh words, foolish decisions, moments of inattention, regrets that wash over me, like water. (196)" ~ Anne Fadiman
7. "Wenn wir die Sprache ändern, um Gleichheit zwischen Männern und Frauen zu stiften, hat das seinen Preis. Damit will ich nicht sagen, dass es nicht geschehen sollte. Viele Dinge, die es letztlich wert sind, dass man sie unternimmt, haben einen hohen Preis. Aber trauern sollten wir um die unbeschwerte Armut unserer Sprache, die uns damit verloren geht, und ihrem Verlust sollten wir so formvollendet und höflich begegnen, wie es jedem Schriftsteller und jeder Schriftstellerin obliegt, die etwas taugen." ~ Anne Fadiman
8. "[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
9. "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
10. "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." ~ Anne Fadiman
11. "I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions." ~ Anne Fadiman
12. "The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it." ~ Anne Fadiman
13. "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." ~ Anne Fadiman
14. "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." ~ Anne Fadiman
15. "I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo." ~ Anne Fadiman
16. "Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence." ~ Anne Fadiman
17. "The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet." ~ Anne Fadiman
18. "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
19. "...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
20. "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
21. "You can miss a lot by sticking to the point." ~ Anne Fadiman
22. "Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I'll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That's something I don't want to live to see." ~ Anne Fadiman
23. "If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone" ~ Anne Fadiman
24. "It's not that I think that computers don't have their place, but surely their place is not in bed, which is my favorite place to read, and surely their place is not snuggled up with a cat in your lap in an old armchair. You can't have your laptop computer and your cat in your lap simultaneously, while trying to manage a cup of tea, which you might spill on your computer. On the other hand, if you spilled your cup of tea on your book -- well, Charles Lamb would probably just like it better. He once said that he particularly liked books that had old muffin crumbs in them. Muffin crumbs in your computer would not be a good idea." ~ Anne Fadiman
25. "The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means "to speak of all kinds of things." It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the world is full of things that may not seem to be connected but actually are; that no event occurs in isolation; that you can miss a lot by sticking to the point; and that the storyteller is likely to be rather long-winded." ~ Anne Fadiman
26. "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." ~ Anne Fadiman
27. "So, if you're a doctor, how can you recognize that you're having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn:Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen or excessive diaphoresis; anger may be manifested by a generalized muscle tightness or a clenching of the jaw; sexual arousal may be noted by a tingling of the loins or piloerection; and sadness may be felt by conjunctival injection or heaviness of the chest." ~ Anne Fadiman
28. "In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar." ~ Anne Fadiman
29. "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
30. "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
31. "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
32. "One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer." ~ Anne Fadiman
33. "Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself." ~ Anne Fadiman
34. "Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself." ~ Anne Fadiman
35. "When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose" ~ Anne Fadiman
36. "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." ~ Anne Fadiman
37. "As he leans over to kiss me good night, I do not regret having graduated from the amorous sprints of our youths. Marriage is a long-distance course, and reading aloud is a kind of romantic Gatorade formulated to invigorate the occasionally exhausted racers." ~ Anne Fadiman
38. "Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase." ~ Anne Fadiman
39. "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
40. "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

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Today's Quote

Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door--a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness."
Author: Bob Dylan

What Did Anne Fadiman Talk About?

Boo
Book
Thin
Con
Read
Hen
Books
Era
Hey
Ten
Old
Use
Wit
She
End
Self
Ear
Pen
Here
Lit
Tan
Late
Story
Ally
Per
Itself
Rest
Cat
Ring
Sin
Mean
Once
Bee
Act
Hand
Miss
Actually
Everyone
Los
Loud
Ways
Tell
May
Print
Inn
Chin
Bed
Stick
Sleep
Literature

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