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9269f30 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 bo.. reading parents child children Anne Fadiman
dfe8e9e I have never been able to resist a book about books. reading books Anne Fadiman
d77bdeb 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. child children Anne Fadiman
e5a4be5 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. story reading books stories Anne Fadiman
fb8a68e 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. library readers Anne Fadiman
2c34714 In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar. books Anne Fadiman
2b885d4 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. Anne Fadiman
2197cf7 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
2b18094 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. shelves parents bookshelves Anne Fadiman
246e503 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
f3591bc 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
1b51d37 I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo. typo Anne Fadiman
c9ef64a One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer. literature Anne Fadiman
d50868e 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. writer writing muses paper pen Anne Fadiman
d2d4f9b 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. rereading Anne Fadiman
bf0521b 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
7311975 Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase. Anne Fadiman
7ae3fa4 The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet. Anne Fadiman
3d20d85 Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs t.. sensory-deprivation sleeplessness night Anne Fadiman
547f258 If you can't see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else's culture? Anne Fadiman
4fd7ee9 If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone Anne Fadiman
da20dc9 I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions. reading Anne Fadiman
2f5f4d6 Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself. view-point Anne Fadiman
c19ffe5 You can miss a lot by sticking to the point. Anne Fadiman
a53d503 Pen-bereavement is a serious matter. writing pens pen writers Anne Fadiman
6332c9b High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners. Anne Fadiman
b3eb0d1 When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'. Anne Fadiman
f4a1123 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. philosophy Anne Fadiman
dee4d97 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. reading-books Anne Fadiman
ea73740 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 heavine.. medicine Anne Fadiman
6bf9914 I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say , never "the ," because meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant -- indeed something only would say." usage Anne Fadiman
1762d7e 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
039266d 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
9288d8c You mean we're going chronological order within each author?" he gasped. "But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!" "Well," I blustered, "we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I'd like to see that reflected on our shelves." George says that was one of the few times he has seriously contemplated divorce." -- marriage organization Anne Fadiman
853ad3b George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know that you might as well be breaking my own spine. books Anne Fadiman
520d3ba 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. sonnets Anne Fadiman
e5ffd08 Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story Anne fadiman
c738f0e You know Anne,' he said quietly, 'when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere. Anne Fadiman
a8dae29 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. scale perspective space Anne Fadiman
7b04109 It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt. Anne Fadiman
8a4d179 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 str.. culture-wars procrustes political-correctness Anne Fadiman
eb90b9d One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you'd opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are "pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, .. rereading Anne Fadiman
9ca4a97 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
377087e believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy. Anne Fadiman
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