Anne Fadiman



Anne Fadiman (born August 7, 1953) is an American essayist and reporter.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998)

 * All page numbers from the first paperback edition, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-52722-8, in 2000, 14th printing


 * Over time, my crush on Balder the Beautiful was converted into a crush on Ross, Franklin, Nares, Shackleton, Oates, and Scott. I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.
 * Chapter 3, “My Odd Shelf” (p. 24)


 * These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.
 * Chapter 3, “My Odd Shelf” (p. 25)


 * I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money. One of the pleasures, or horrors, of the direct-mail business is that you never know to whom your name will be pandered. My friend Ross Baughman, a photographer who once accompanied a group of American mercenaries to Nicaragua, inquired before the trip about a mail-order night-vision scope that would allow him to take pictures during midnight commando raids without using a flash. Ever since, he has been deluge with catalogs for pamphlets on how to make rifle silencers out of old car mufflers and napalm out of laundry detergent.
 * Chapter 14, “The Catalogical Imperative” (p. 114)