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Clifton Fadiman

Clifton Fadiman Books

Intellectual

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“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.”

“[Books] will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as either transient acquaintances or permanent friends. They will stay as long as you like, departing or returning as you wish. Their friendship entails no obligation. Best of all, and not always true of our merely human friends, they have Cleopatra's infinite variety.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”