Christopher Morley > Quotes

“There's Hardy's Dynasts for example. When you read that book you can feel it blowing up your mind. It leaves you gasping, ill, nauseated - oh, it's not pleasant to feel some really pure intellect filtered into one's brain! It hurts! There's enough T. N. T. in that book to blast war from the face of the globe. But there's a slow fuse attached to it. It hasn't really exploded yet. Maybe it won't for another fifty years.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Certainly night-time has a mystic affinity for literature...”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“… you can blow up a man with  gun powder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”  Roger Mifflin in Christopher Morley’s “The Haunted Bookshop”
― Christopher Morley

“Nothing is so rare as a collection of really intelligent short stories.”
― Morley, Christopher

“But I tell you, the world is going to have the truth about War. We're going to put an end to this madness. It's not going to be easy. Just now, in the intoxication of the German collapse, we're all rejoicing in our new happiness. I tell you, the real Peace will be a long time coming. When you tear up all the fibres of civilization it's a slow job to knit things together again. You see those children going down the street to school? Peace lies in their hands. When they are taught in school that War is the most loathsome scourge humanity is subject to, that it smirches and fouls every lovely occupation of the mortal spirit, then there may be some hope for the future. But I'd like to bet they are having it drilled into them that war is a glorious and noble sacrifice.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“When you come to man, what a chaos of hungers and impulses keep thrusting him through his cycle of quaint tasks!”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“I only deal in second-hand books; I only buy books that I consider have some reason for existence.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“The human yearning for innocent pastime is a pathetic thing, come to think about it. It shows what a desperately grim thing life has become.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop by Morley Christopher Morley

“God help us - let's love the world, love humanity - not just our own country! That's why I'm so keen about the part we're going to play at the Peace Conference. Our motto over there will be America Last! Hurrah for us, I say, for we shall be the only nation over there with absolutely no axe to grind.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men - a passion which, however, is commendable in those who feel themselves handicapped by a college career and a jeweled fraternity emblem.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Of course one can't help loving one's country," he added. "I love mine so much that I want to see her take the lead in making a new era possible. She has sacrificed least for war, she should be ready to sacrifice most for peace. As for me," he said, smiling, "I'd be willing to sacrifice the whole Republican party!”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”
― Christopher Morley

“Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it”
― Christopher Morley

“A book's a book if you enjoy reading it.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“I wish I could know how much of what I think now was really what I thought then, and how much is what I now think I should have thought? It's hard to carry thoughts along with you, like food in the icebox they don't keep, you kid yourself without knowing it.”
― Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle

“A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“A cause which is so true shouldn't need the sacrifice of millions of fine lives," said Roger gravely. "Don't imagine I don't see the dreadful nobility of it. But poor humanity shouldn't be asked to be noble at such a cost. That's the most pitiful tragedy of it all. Don't you suppose the Germans thought they too were marching off for a noble cause when they began it and forced this misery on the world? The had been educated to believe it so, for a generation.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“The first thing you'll find, when the Peace Conference gets to work, will be that we shall have to help Germany onto her feet again so that she can be punished in an orderly way. We shall have to feed her and admit her to commerce so that she can pay her indemnities - we shall have to police her cities to prevent revolution from burning her up - and the upshot of it all will be that men will have fought the most terrible war in history, and endured nameless horrors, for the privilege of nursing their enemy back to health.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“…The real book-lovers, you know, are generally among the humbler classes. A man who is impassioned with books has little time or patience to grow rich by concocting schemes for cozening his fellows.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop by Morley Christopher Morley

“If a man is settled in one place he years to wander, when he wander he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content - all the great things in life are done by discontented people.”
― Christopher Morley, Parnassus On Wheels

“I'm wondering about this daylight-saving business," she said. "You know, I think it's all a piece of Bolshevik propaganda to get us confused and encourage anarchy.”
― Christopher Morley, Mince Pie

“There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop