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Book: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Quotes of Book: Ex Libris: Confessions of a
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  1. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    ...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.
    book-quote

  2. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    -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.
    book-quoteincompetence

  3. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    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.
    book-quote

  4. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    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.
    book-quotehumor

  5. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    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.
    book-quotebooksmint-condition

  6. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    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 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 books, and the currency of each one becomes debased.
    book-quoterereading

  7. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.
    book-quote

  8. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    -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.
    book-quotebookworm

  9. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    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.}
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  10. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    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.
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  11. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    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 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.
    book-quoterereading

  12. Anne Fadiman _ Ex Libris: Confessions of a

    You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?
    book-quote
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