CMChristopher Morley

55 collected words

Christopher Morley

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Christopher Morley / quote

02Undated

Suppose someone tried to write your biography. What nonsense! How much would he know? Would he know what you thought when you looked in the subway slot-machine? How brutally you spoke when you were angry? How Nature rode you with a busy spur? How you fell on your knees late at night?

Christopher Morley / quote

03Undated

There is only one success-to be able to spend life in your own way.

Christopher Morley / quote

04Undated

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

Christopher Morley / quote

05Undated

When you sell a man a book you don't sell 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.

Christopher Morley / quote

06Undated

That's what this country needs -- more books!

Christopher Morley / quote

07Undated

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

Christopher Morley / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

Christopher Morley / quote

10Undated

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.

Christopher Morley / quote

11Undated

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 / quote

12Undated

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 / quote

13Undated

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 / quote

14Undated

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 / quote

15Undated

Even the most innocent of men's affairs seem doomed to cause suffering. Pushing the lawnmower through tall wet grass, and enjoying the strong aroma of the morning, I found that the blades had cut a frog in half. I have not forgotten his eyes.

Christopher Morley / quote

16Undated

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, everyday, 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 continually be part of unanimity.

Christopher Morley / quote

17Undated

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 / quote

18Undated

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.

Christopher Morley / quote

19Undated

Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I'm beginning to guess that everybody's like that.

Christopher Morley / quote

20Undated

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

Christopher Morley / quote

21Undated

No man is lonely while eating spaghetti:it requires so much attention.

Christopher Morley / quote

22Undated

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.

Christopher Morley / quote

23Undated

Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep.

Christopher Morley / quote

24Undated

Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.

Christopher Morley / quote