Christopher Morley > Quotes

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”
― Christopher Morley, Pipefuls

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.”
― Christopher Morley

“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.”
― Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels

“If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.”
― Christopher Morley

“No man is lonely while eating spaghetti:
it requires so much attention.”
― Christopher Morley

“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”
― Christopher Morley

“There is only one success-to be able to spend life in your own way.”
― Christopher Morley

“High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.”
― Christopher Morley

“That's what this country needs -- more books!”
― Christopher Morley

“Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder 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.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“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.”
― Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels

“ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK
LENT TO A FRIEND

I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition.

I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff.

WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again.

BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again.

PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.”
― Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels

“The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. ”
― Christopher Morley

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”
― Christopher Morley

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It's like falling in love.”
― Christopher Moreley

“There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“There's no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”
― Christopher Morley

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

“Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age.”
― Christopher Morley

“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.”
― Christopher Morley

“No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.”
― Christopher Morley

“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.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. ”
― Christopher Morley

“It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way. ”
― Christopher Morley

“Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable.”
― Christopher Morley, Parnassus On Wheels

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.”
― Christopher Morley