Fadiman Citation Quotes

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 aroma 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 exposed, confesses its guilty secrets: "My characters are wooden! My plot creaks! I am pre-feminist, pre-deconstructivist, and pre-postcolonialist!" (The upside of English classes is that they give you critical tools, some of which are useful, but the downside is that those tools make you less able to shower your books with unconditional love. Conditions are the very thing you're asked to learn.) You read too many other books, and the currency of each one becomes debased. ~ Anne Fadiman

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. ~ Clifton Fadiman

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

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering
naked and alone ~ Anne Fadiman

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

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar. ~ Anne Fadiman

We are all citizens of history. ~ Clifton Fadiman

Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story ~ Anne Fadiman

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

The cumulative weight of all mortal sins
past, present, and future
pressed upon that perfect, sinless, and sensitive Soul! All our infirmities and sicknesses were somehow, too, a part of the awful arithmetic of the Atonement. (See Alma 7:11-12; Isa. 53:3-5; Matt. 8:17.) The anguished Jesus not only pled with the Father that the hour and cup might pass from Him, but with this relevant citation. 'And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me.' (Mark 14:35-36.) ~ Neal A. Maxwell

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

The Bluebook is an absurdity, but it endures, in fact thrives, impervious to criticism and ridicule. The judiciary navigates the sea of modernity, slowed, thrown of course, by the barnacles of legal formalism (semantic escapes from reality, impoverished sense of context, fear of math and science, insensitivity to language and culture, mangling of history, superfluous footnotes, verbosity, excessive quotation, reader-unfriendly prose, exaggeration, bluster, obsession with citation form) – an accumulation of many centuries, yet constantly augmented. There is little desire to give the hull a good scraping. There is fear that the naked hull would be unslightly, even unseaworthy. The fear is overblown. A week after all the copies of the Bluebook were burned, their absence would not be noticed. ~ Richard A. Posner

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

I am grateful to be able to participate in the adult citation program where I will complete community service. ~ Jameis Winston

I have never been able to resist a book about books. ~ Anne Fadiman

Marina wouldn't want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she's good. ~ Anne Fadiman

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can't be copyrighted. ~ David Shields

In white neighborhoods, only 1 in 41 properties that could have received a nuisance citation actually did receive one. In black neighborhoods, 1 in 16 eligible properties received a citation. A woman reporting domestic violence was far more likely to land her landlord a nuisance citation if she lived in the inner city.

In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting the tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls. Sometimes, this meant evicting a couple, but most of the time landlords evicted women abused by men who did not live with them. ~ Matthew Desmond

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

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

I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions. ~ Anne Fadiman

My very first role was with James Earl Jones on 'Gabriel's Fire' on TV. He drove a Chevy Citation, which is the exact same car that I bought from a guy in San Francisco called Sandy Boone. I showed up on set, and James Earl Jones was driving the car I had bought from Sandy for $250. ~ Leland Orser

Spaces again. I guess one citation wasn't enough." Pendergast pulled out the previous ticket. "You mean this?" "That's right." Pendergast neatly tore it in half and tucked the pieces back into his pocket. The chief frowned. ~ Douglas Preston

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure ~ Anne Fadiman

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. ~ Anne Fadiman

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history ~ Clifton Fadiman

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

To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings. ~ Clifton Fadiman

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

On her ideal dinner party: 'Virginia Woolf, Coleridge and Charles Lamb would have to be there. I would be scurrying around in the kitchen with Mary Lamb - she and I would do the cooking. Of course my brother would be there. I think that's about enough. That number would sustain a single conversation. Virginia and I would be the centre of attention. ~ Anne Fadiman

By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one. ~ Clifton Fadiman

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. ~ Clifton Fadiman

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo. ~ Anne Fadiman

For all I see, humanity is lost. It's devastatingly sad. ~ Laure Lacornette

Bernard: ... By the way, Valentina, do you want credit? - 'the game book recently discovered by.'?
Valentine: It was never lost, Bernard.
Bernard: 'As recently pointed out by.' I don't normally like giving credit where it's due, but with scholarly articles as with divorce, there is a certain cachet in citing a member of the aristocracy. I'll pop it in ad lib for the lecture, and give you a mention in the press release. How's that?
Valentine: Very kind. ~ Tom Stoppard

Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one? ~ Abraham Pais

If you think you've never lived up to a situation, you have your own story or you will be the hero. ~ Chris TDL

Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

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

Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I'll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That's something I don't want to live to see. ~ Anne Fadiman

A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover ~ Clifton Fadiman

Literature is the original Internet – every footnote, every citation, every allusion is essentially a hyperlink to another text, to another mind. ~ Maria Popova

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

Sometimes I believe that in life every promise should be taken with suspicion, disbelief, even as a lie because it features knights in the world without knights can not exist. Increasingly it seems that the people make promises lightly, and even easier to not fulfill. I believe that the main task of each of us to make this world a better position, so that all become knights, the swords do not carry it, but the words behind which we stand. ~ Slavisa Pavlovic