...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.
Interpretation
Experiencing something only once limits our understanding and appreciation of it.
Anne Fadiman's quote highlights the idea that depth of experience is essential for true appreciation, whether it be through reading a book or listening to music. Just as a listener misses out on the full beauty of a Beethoven symphony by only attending a single performance, a reader can miss the multifaceted insights and joys a book offers by only reading it once.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a book club to emphasize the value of rereading.
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.
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.
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.
Literature taught me that I wasn't alone, that I could become a writer if I worked at it, that my story mattered. Whether a young reader becomes a writer or not, they deserve to know that their story, whatever it may be, is important.
Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
It is easier to build a boy than to mend a man.
We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)
Some are bewildered in the maze of schools, And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools.
I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.
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