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

Categorized in : Children Book Daughter

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

sleep writing book

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

Anne Fadiman

nineteen views book

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

borders weather interesting

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

bookstores cat sleep

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

book children thinking

It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.

Anne Fadiman

ice-cream errors weather

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

Anne Fadiman

able book

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.

Anne Fadiman

library belief long

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

refrigerators stories book

Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.

Anne Fadiman

views reality

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

parenting children thinking

The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.

Anne Fadiman

shoreline edges action

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

Anne Fadiman

influence drug doubt

Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.

Anne Fadiman

cutting reading mean

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

cities sleep writing

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose

Anne Fadiman

purple dark writing

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

Anne Fadiman

missing

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

Anne Fadiman

naked eternity soul

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

scotch believe book

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

Anne Fadiman

literature people way