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“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.â€� Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

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

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

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

“[T]here is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

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

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

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

“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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“-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, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader