Top 50 Anne Fadiman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Cultural humility” acknowledges that doctors bring the baggage of their own cultures – their own ethnic backgrounds along with the culture of medicine – to the patient’s bedside, and that these may not necessarily be superior.”

— Anne Fadiman

2. “If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture?”

— Anne Fadiman

3. “You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.”

— Anne Fadiman

4. “If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering – naked and alone.”

— Anne Fadiman

5. “The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.”

— Anne Fadiman

6. “Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.”

— Anne Fadiman

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

— Anne Fadiman

Featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.”

— Anne Fadiman

9. “You know Anne,′ he said quietly, ’when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere.”

— Anne Fadiman

10. “It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.”

— Anne Fadiman

11. “Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.”

— Anne Fadiman

12. “You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before ou get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together is is like putting glue on a broken glass.”

— Anne Fadiman

13. “The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.” So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory.”

— Anne Fadiman

14. “I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.”

— Anne Fadiman

15. “It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both preserved her life and compromised it. I was unsure which had hurt her family more.”

— Anne Fadiman

16. “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.”

— Anne Fadiman

17. “If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.”

— Anne Fadiman

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

— Anne Fadiman

19. “E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.”

— Anne Fadiman

20. “To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you’ve only pressed Pause.”

— Anne Fadiman

21. “George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know that you might as well be breaking my own spine.”

— Anne Fadiman

22. “My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak.”

— Anne Fadiman

23. “We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.”

— Anne Fadiman

24. “During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.”

— Anne Fadiman

25. “A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.”

— Anne Fadiman

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

— Anne Fadiman

Featured in: Reading Quotes

27. “It has long been my belief that everyone’s library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.”

— Anne Fadiman

28. “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.”

— Anne Fadiman

29. “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.”

— Anne Fadiman

30. “I have never been able to resist a book about books.”

— Anne Fadiman

31. “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.”

— Anne Fadiman

32. “On her ideal dinner party: ‘Virginia Woolf, Coleridge and Charles Lamb would have to be there. I would be scurrying around in the kitchen with Mary Lamb – she and I would do the cooking. Of course my brother would be there. I think that’s about enough. That number would sustain a single conversation. Virginia and I would be the centre of attention.”

— Anne Fadiman

33. “Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.”

— Anne Fadiman

34. “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.”

— Anne Fadiman

35. “I’ll meet some people who’ll treat me mean and I’ll just pray that I’ll never be like them. And then I’ll meet some very nice people and I will take a little bit of them and make myself a better person.”

— Anne Fadiman

36. “If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown ‘girl’ would probably be transformed into a’woman’.”

— Anne Fadiman

37. “I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.”

— Anne Fadiman

38. “Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. 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.”

— Anne Fadiman

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

— Anne Fadiman

40. “In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.”

— Anne Fadiman

41. “When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.”

— Anne Fadiman

42. “I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one’s life wearing a typo.”

— Anne Fadiman

43. “It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.”

— Anne Fadiman

44. “Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.”

— Anne Fadiman

45. “You’re a romantic. What’s romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?”

— Anne Fadiman

46. “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.”

— Anne Fadiman

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

— Anne Fadiman

48. “As he leans over to kiss me good night, I do not regret having graduated from the amorous sprints of our youths. Marriage is a long-distance course, and reading aloud is a kind of romantic Gatorade formulated to invigorate the occasionally exhausted racers.”

— Anne Fadiman

49. “When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos...”

— Anne Fadiman

50. “Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I’ll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That’s something I don’t want to live to see.”

— Anne Fadiman