The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Anne Fadiman

The Hmong never had any interest in ruling over the Chinese or anyone else; they wanted merely to be left alone, which, as their later history was also to illustrate, may be the most difficult request any minority can make of a majority culture.

I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.

humor, reading-books

…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.

So, if you’re a doctor, how can you recognize that you’re having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn:Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen or excessive diaphoresis; anger may be manifested by a generalized muscle tightness or a clenching of the jaw; sexual arousal may be noted by a tingling of the loins or piloerection; and sadness may be felt by conjunctival injection or heaviness of the chest.

emotion, medicine

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor’s window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.

concentration, night, sensory-deprivation, sleeplessness

Marina wouldn’t want to be remembered because she dead. She would want to be remembered because she’s good.

after-death, being-remembered, memory, talent

I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch I’ll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.

addiction, reading

…the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

reading, rereading

Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.

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

When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin’s officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, 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 button polish, and a copy of “The Vicar of Wakefield.” These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.

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.