Christopher Morley

"Lord!" he said, "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. Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom huckster, people would run to the gate when I came by — just waiting for my stuff. And here I go loaded with everlasting salvation — yes, ma'am, salvation for their little, stunted minds — and it's hard to make 'em see it. That's what makes it worth while — I'm doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. It's a new field, but by the bones of Whitman, it's worth while. That's what this country needs — more books!"

"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."

"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."

"The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen and actors at 11 o'clock in the morning."

"Philadelphia was the first city to foresee the advantages of a Federal constitution and oatmeal as a breakfast food."

"We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul."

"My theology, briefly, Is that the Universe Was Dictated But not Signed."

"Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment."

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

""Poetry," said Shelley, "lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." This, if you substitute 'absurdity' for 'beauty,' is also a good definition of humour. Mr. Chaplin has made the most familiar objects in the world—elderly shoes and trousers—something exceedingly rich and strange. Humour 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 every-day affairs."

"Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it."

"Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs?"

"April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go."