Site uses cookies to provide basic functionality.

OK
Search Quotes tags
Query
Tags
Author
1 2 3 ▲ ▼
Link Quote Stars Tags Author
8380e37 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. humor Anne Fadiman
9f75b49 I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. Anne Fadiman
6cb3c03 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
8c8805e 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 g.. Anne Fadiman
5909d1a 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
f395cf8 Cultural humility" acknowledges that doctors bring the baggage of their own cultures--their own ethnic backgrounds along with the culture of medicine--to the patient's bedside, and that these may not necessarily be superior." Anne Fadiman
bc3d148 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. This is especially true, I think, when the apposition is cultural. Anne Fadiman
2a01bff In Laos, a baby was never apart from its mother, sleeping in her arms all night and riding on her back all day. Small children were rarely abused; it was believed that a dab who witnessed mistreatment might take the child, assuming it was not wanted. The Hmong who live in the United States have continued to be unusually attentive parents. A study conducted at the University of Minnesota found Hmong infants in the first month of life to be l.. Anne Fadiman
90b3a60 When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield." These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen." -- humor Anne Fadiman
ca7bc71 A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness. Anne Fadiman
e998d3b In Minneapolis, tires were slashed and windows smashed. A high school student getting off a bus was hit in the face and told to "go back to China." A woman was kicked in the thighs, face, and kidneys, and her purse, which contained the family's entire savings of $400, was stolen; afterwards, she forbade her children to play outdoors, and her husband, who had once commanded a fifty-man unit in the Armee Clandestine, stayed home to guard the .. Anne Fadiman
2f83863 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." So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory." Anne Fadiman
8d8658d 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
0871108 During the late 1910s and early '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory "Americanization" classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was "I am a good American." During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with te.. Anne Fadiman
e0adac8 You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there? Anne Fadiman
194a0fc And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading, acts that Henry and I were preforming simultaneously. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it the former: even while, as wi.. rereading Anne Fadiman
f133fd7 It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more. Anne Fadiman
622c359 I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice -- at least in my reading -- I'm un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day. Anne Fadiman
8c1e3f4 After they returned home, a performed the ritual chant that accompanied his journey to the realm of the unseen. During the chant, the cow's severed head was sitting on the Lees' front stoop, welcoming Lia's soul. When I asked the Lees whether any American passersby might have been surprised by this sight, Foua said, "No, I don't think they would be surprised, because it wasn't the whole cow on the doorstep, only the head." Nao Kao added, .. Anne Fadiman
647ce8a It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead--such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce--the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority. Anne Fadiman
f2babd6 During the late 1910s and early '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory "Americanization" classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was "I am a good American." Anne Fadiman
425aaea A sponsoring pastor in Minnesota told a local newspaper, "It would be wicked to just bring them over and feed and clothe them and let them go to hell. The God who made us wants them to be converted. If anyone thinks that a gospel-preaching church would bring them over and not tell them about the Lord, they're out of their mind." Anne Fadiman
3381527 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
fb213d5 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, .. Anne Fadiman
0eec0d1 our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them. bookworm Anne Fadiman
5d10a64 But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away. Anne Fadiman
c3978a8 When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife. Anne Fadiman
a7decbd The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later rereadings are often likely to disappoint. "The sharp luscious flavor, the fine is fled," Hazlitt wrote, "and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left." Terrible words, but it can happen. You become harder to move, frighten, arouse, provoke, jangle. Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar.. rereading Anne Fadiman
8566a39 The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. books mint-condition Anne Fadiman
249f1a3 One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about "Treasure Island." I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: "Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese -- toasted mostly." I repeated the last two words over and over again, like a mantra. "Toasted, mostly. Toasted mostly... humor Anne Fadiman
5a27804 The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United States for the same reason they had left China in the nineteenth century: because they were trying to resist assimilation. immigration Anne Fadiman
2767eb6 Conquergood considered his relationship with the Hmong to be a form of barter, "a productive and mutually invigorating dialog, with neither side dominating or winning out." In his opinion, the physicians and nurses at Ban Vinai failed to win the cooperation of the camp inhabitants because they considered the relationship one-sided, with the Westerners holding all the knowledge. As long as they persisted in this view, Conquergood believed th.. Anne Fadiman
9577c59 Every Hmong has a different version of what is commonly called "The Promise": a written or oral contract, made by CIA personnel in Laos, that if they fought for the Americans, the Americans would aid them if the Pathet Lao won the war. After risking their lives to rescue downed American pilots, seeing their villages flattened by incidental American bombs, and being forced to flee their country because they had supported the "American War," .. Anne Fadiman
7429984 Also, although the great majority of the letters I've received from Hmong readers have been positive, most of the negative ones have criticized me for telling a story that was not mine to tell. I am no lover of identity politics; I believe that anyone should be allowed to write about anyone. Still, I would have harbored the same proprietary resentment had I been they. It was exactly how I felt thirty years ago, when women's voices were hard.. Anne Fadiman
5b09e63 her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with Anne Fadiman
5a64730 When you think about Laos and about not having enough food and those dirty and torn-up clothes, you don't want to think. Here it is a great country. You are comfortable. You have something to eat. But you don't speak the language. You depend on other people for welfare. If they don't give you money you can't eat, and you would die of hunger. What I miss in Laos is that free spirit, doing what you want to do. You own your own fields, your ow.. Anne Fadiman
4e1144a My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak. Anne Fadiman
1b5ce6f the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of buttons polish, and a copy of 'The Vicar of Wakefield.' These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen. incompetence Anne Fadiman
67f2660 To nature lovers, the season of new beginnings is the spring, but to people who excel in school, it's the fall. seasons Anne Fadiman
6a5de41 we expect a wine of quality to demand something from us. Anne Fadiman
d214f16 Benjamin Franklin wrote that he would like to be embalmed in a cask of Madeira Anne Fadiman
980b647 Their tastes change not because their palates improve but because they deteriorate. Anne Fadiman
0b23753 Bordeaux are named after chateaux. Castles. Anne Fadiman
c280512 Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, Anne Fadiman
1 2 3 ▲ ▼