93 Quotes by Anne Fadiman

The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller.

It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more.

One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about “Treasure Island.” I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: “Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted mostly.” I repeated the last two words over and over again, like a mantra. “Toasted, mostly. Toasted mostly.

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.

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.

When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.

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

You’re a romantic. What’s romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?

To nature lovers, the season of new beginnings is the spring, but to people who excel in school, it’s the fall.