My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.
Interpretation
Our understanding of loved ones can often be deeper through their interests than through personal invasion.
In this quote, Anne Fadiman highlights how personal artifacts, such as books, can provide profound insights into a person's character, values, and aspirations. Rather than breaching privacy to uncover deeper truths about their parents, she and her brother found that the books they chose to keep revealed more about their personalities and styles than mere possessions could. This suggests that our intellectual and emotional landscapes are encapsulated in what we read and enjoy.
In practice
In a speech about understanding family dynamics, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of literature in revealing personal values.
Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
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.
There's no perfection in family life, and certainly we aren't perfect, but we're probably about as close as we can be.
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
Our kids are reflections of us. How we interact with others, even in a hostile situation... how we respond and our children see that is how they are going to respond.
I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.
My mother had no idea that her daughter would turn out to be a writer, but she would not let me go through a day of my childhood without music.
I still can’t say whether I ever want children….I can only say how I feel now--grateful to be on my own. I also know that I won’t go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don’t think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth.
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