Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

by Anne Fadiman

Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, “wake out of the book.” “Wake” is just the right verb,

When I think of the causes for which people more commonly give up their lives—nationalism, religion, ethnicity—it seems to me that a thirty-five-pound bag of rocks, and the lost world it represents, is not such a bad thing to die for.

in short, to discover that the convent’s narrow room that he had been forced to occupy was, though terrible, considerably wider than he had expected.

just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book.

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them,” he wrote to a friend, “to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”

that “or her” was “understood,” just as womankind was understood to be lurking somewhere within “mankind.”

by altering the line breaks, the plagiarist had actually improved the poems,

When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative. One partner provides the words, the other the rhythm.

come to view margins as a literary commons with grazing room for everyone—the

“Alas,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher. “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore!”

books get their value from the way they coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning.