Ex Libris Quotes

“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.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading, acts that Henry and I were preforming simultaneously. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I’d read it, when it had seemed as swift and pure as the Winding Arrow, the river that divides Calormen from Archenland.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“Entre los dos, mis padres tenían unos siete mil libros. Cada vez que nos mudábamos de casa, un carpintero construía medio kilómetro de estanterías; cada vez que nos íbamos, los nuevos dueños las arrancaban. Para mí las paredes de los demás estaban desnudas. Las nuestras no eran telones de fondo blancos y sosos para colgar cuadros, eran obras de arte por sí mismas, mosaicos desde el suelo hasta el techo cuyos azulejos de colores vívidos eran rectángulos delgados, agradables al tacto e incluso, si a uno le gustaba la fragancia polvorienta del papel viejo, al olor.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this story was told, everyone.around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.)”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later rereadings are often likely to disappoint. “The sharp luscious flavor, the fine aroma is fled,” Hazlitt wrote, “and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left.” Terrible words, but it can happen. You become harder to move, frighten, arouse, provoke, jangle. Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar exposed, confesses its guilty secrets: “My characters are wooden! My plot creaks! I am pre-feminist, pre-deconstructivist, and pre-postcolonialist!” (The upside of English classes is that they give you critical tools, some of which are useful, but the downside is that those tools make you less able to shower your books with unconditional love. Conditions are the very thing you’re asked to learn.) You read too many other books, and the currency of each one becomes debased.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“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.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“-the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of buttons polish, and a copy of 'The Vicar of Wakefield.' These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“-our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“We know fewer words, and the ones we know are less beautiful. The words we've lost tend to be connotative, and the ones we've gained tend to be denotative. I've never seen "modem" used in a poem.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“He would surely have agreed that we were alike where it really counted: we were both hard-core devotees of what I call You-Are-There Reading, the practice of reading books in the places they describe.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“Entonces la vi: una pequeña tienda azotada por los elementos, encaramada en una pendiente tan inclinada que parecía estar a punto de deslizarse hacia el río Hudson, con un cartel deslucido de color azul encima de la puerta donde se leía LIBRERÍA. En el interior había un escritorio desordenado, un laberinto de estanterías sin aplomar, una nube de notas de polvo y 300.000 libros de segunda mano. Siete horas más tarde, salimos de la librería Riverrun con ocho kilos de libros. (Los pesé cuando llegamos a casa)”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

“...in the midst of the tumult, part ecstasy and part panic, into which all first-time mothers are thrown by sleep deprivation and headlong identity realignment.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader