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.”
― Anne Fadiman

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“I have never been able to resist a book about books.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“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.”
― Anne Fadiman

“In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.”
― Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“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.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“...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, Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.”
― Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.”
― Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“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 that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.”
― Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

“I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone”
― Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story”
― Anne fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

“Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories