Christopher Morley Quotes

Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.

It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly.

It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.

"I have heard laughter, and I think it is the laughter of God." The congregation stirred a little, with polite uneasiness. This was not quite the sort of thing to which they were accustomed. "Why should God laugh? I think it is because He sees that very often, when we pretend to be worshipping Him, we are really worshipping and gratifying ourselves."

I went to the theatre with the author of a successful play. He insisted on explaining everything. He told me what to watch, the details of the direction, the errors of the property man, the foibles of the star. He anticipated all of my surprises and ruined the evening. Never again! And mark you, the greatest author of all made no such mistake.

"Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

nessuno come un cane sa apprezzare la straordinarietà della tua conversazione.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.