Quotes from Anne Fadiman

Going through a dead parent's memorabilia is a hazardous undertaking; there is a fine line between pleasure and pain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United States for the same reason they had left China in the nineteenth century: because they were trying to resist assimilation.

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

her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with

As Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, describing the act of letter-writing: "Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something

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.)

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.

To nature lovers, the season of new beginnings is the spring, but to people who excel in school, it's the fall.

we expect a wine of quality to demand something from us.

When he looked back at the menu as an old man, it brought back everything; the food, the wine, the private dining room, the pride he took in being able to pay for such a dinner, the convergence of his life as a writer and his life as an oenophile, the conviviality that grew as the night continued and everyone had a little too much to drink but not enough to impair the quality of the conversation, some of which, I feel sure, was about the wines themselves.

Brussels sprouts, peaches

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.

Their tastes change not because their palates improve but because they deteriorate.

wine stores should organize their bottles not by origin and varietal but by alcohol content and intensity of flavor

I have never met a miserly wine lover.

he never had fewer than seven jobs and at one point had thirteen.

He was constantly, pathologically, insanely busy. That's how he afforded the wine.

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.

High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see.

Dan Murphy's diagnosis added Lia Lee to a distibguished line of epileptics that has inlcuded Soren Kierkegaard, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all of whom, like many Hmong shamans, experienced powerful senses of grandeur and spiritiual passion during their seizures, and powerful creative urges in their wake.