Christopher Morley Quotes

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversations as a dog does

Der Hunger nach guten Büchern ist weiter verbreitet und hartnäckiger, als Sie glauben, aber in gewisser Weise trotzdem vielfach unbewusst. Die Menschen brauchen Bücher, wissen es aber nicht. Meistens wissen sie gar nicht, dass es die Bücher, die sie brauchen, überhaupt gibt.

Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.

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.

There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve
that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much.

"heart?""Will you write for Bunion and Callous, the trade organ of the Floorwalkers' Union, a thousand-word review of your career?""Will"

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.

I used to regard dish-washing merely as an ignoble chore, a kind of hateful discipline which had to be undergone with knitted brow and brazen fortitude. When my wife went away the first time, I erected a reading stand and an electric light over the sink, and used to read while my hands went automatically through base gestures of purification.

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

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.

It is so easy to let life go by us in its swift amusing course, that sometimes it hardly seems worthwhile to attempt any bold strokes for truth. Truth, of course, does not need assistance; it can afford to ignore our errors. But in this quiet place, among the whisper of the trees, I seem to have heard a disconcerning sound. I have heard laughter, and I think it is the laughter of God.

Il paradiso del mondo di là è incerto, ma vi è effettivamente un cielo su questa terra, un cielo nel quale abitiamo tutti quando leggiamo un buon libro.