Quotes from Clifton Fadiman

To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover

Dr. Seuss provided "ingenious and uniquely witty solutions to the standing problem of the juvenile fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole.

Reading to small children is a specialty.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn't know you knew.

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history

Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

Wine is] poetry in a bottle.

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.

Don't be afraid of poetry.

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.

Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

As for those who think they don't like to read, well, I know they're making a mistake, just as all of us do when we try to judge ourselves. Now is the time to give reading a chance, for if you don't get the habit when you're young you may never get it. And if you don't get it, you may grow up to be just as dull as most adults are.

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.

An aphorism can contain only as much wisdom as overstatement will permit.

We all die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disenthralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something—not much, but something—of our position in space and time.

People who believe in The Truth often read one book or a group of books all their lives. For them the last word has been uttered by, say, Thomas Aquinas or Adolf Hitler or Friedrich Nietzsche. Hence they stick to their particular Bible and wear it to shreds. Such readers are almost always psychopaths. A one-book man is a dangerous man and should be taken in hand and taught how to diversify his literary investments.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.