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.
I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.
There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
It's taken me 40-something years, but I embrace the curl. My littlest daughter has the same hair. She likes it when my hair is curly, so I wear it for her.
You parents of the wilful and the wayward! Don't give them up. Don't cast them off. They are not utterly lost. The Shepherd will find his sheep. They were His before they were yours - long before He entrusted them to your care; and you cannot begin to love them as He loves them.
My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one.
Our favorite teams bring people together, keep family members close, bond people from different generations. Some of the happiest moments of my life involve something that happened with one of my teams. Some of the best relationships I ever had were with Boston athletes that I never even met.
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