Clifton Fadiman Quotes
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Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
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Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.
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We are all citizens of history.
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Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
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The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
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Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.
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Name me any liquid — except our own blood — that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived to mark our status as human beings, from the rudest peasant festival to the mystery of the Eucharist.
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When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
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By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one
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Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.
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Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
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There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.
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A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
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If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul.
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Reading to small children is a specialty.
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I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.
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One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
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When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
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The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
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A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.
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A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.
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I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
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Dr. Seuss provided "ingenious and uniquely witty solutions to the standing problem of the juvenile fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole.
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My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don't want to be a pal, I want to be a father.
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What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.
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We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.
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The drinking of wine seems to me to have a moral edge over many pleasures and hobbies in that it promotes love of one's neighbor.
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Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.
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If you want to feel at home, stay home.
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To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
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