Quotes from Anne Fadiman

Bordeaux are named after châteaux. Castles.

When your child is in the hospital, suddenly somebody else is feeding them, somebody else is changing their pants, somebody else is deciding how and when they will be bathed. It takes all the autonomy of being a parent away, even for folks who have had a lot of medical experience. It would be that much harder if you were from another culture and didn't understand the purpose of all these things.

I remember having a little bit of a feeling of awe at how differently we looked at the world. It was very foreign to me that they had the ability to stand firm in the face of an expert opinion.

they seemed to accept things that to me were major catastrophes as part of the normal flow of life. For them, the crisis was the treatment, not the epilepsy.

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

Reading a favorite book to your child is one of the most pleasurable forms of rereading, provided the child's enthusiasm is equal to yours and thus gratifyingly validates your literary taste, your parental competence, and your own former self.

In my opinion, consensual reality is better than facts. (Sukey Waller)

After a few months went by, Dee started leaving her own baby with Foua when she took Lia to medical appointments-perhaps the first instance in the history of Child Protective Services that a foster mother has asked a legally abusive parent to baby-sit for her.

Now I only have one rule. Before I do anything I ask, Is it okay? Because I'm an American woman and they don't expect me to act like a Hmong anyway, they usually give me plenty of leeway.

Your soul is like your shadow, she said. Sometimes it just wanders off like a butterfly and that is when you are sad and that's when you get sick, and if it comes back to you, that is when you are happy and you are well again.

wasn't education a matter of infusing one's life with flavorful essences, pressing out the impurities, and leaving only a little sludge at the bottom?

In 1965, Johnson commented sanctimoniously that the problem of Laos is the refusal of the Communist forces to honor the Geneva Accords, What he failed to mention was that his own country wasn't honoring them either; it was just doing a better job of keeping its violations secret.

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.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

Shakespeare was an anti-Semite

He simply could not imagine a time when being a Jew, or even a half Jew, was not a disability.

The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.