93 Quotes by Anne Fadiman

I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice – at least in my reading – I’m un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day.

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.

During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown ‘girl’ would probably be transformed into a’woman’.

It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.

The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.” So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory.

You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before ou get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together is is like putting glue on a broken glass.

But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren’t careful, they floated away.

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.