"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 (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"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

"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 (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"I have never been able to resist a book about books."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"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 (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"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 (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"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

"Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"Pen-bereavement is a serious matter."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone"
— Anne Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down)

"One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer."
— Anne Fadiman (At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays)

"A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness."
— Anne Fadiman (Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love)

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

"A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet."
— Anne Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down)

"His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"A sonnet might look dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never "the hoi polloi," because hoi meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)