Quotes by Christopher Morley

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

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

“No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does”

“Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.”

“The greatest poem ever knownIs one all poets have outgrown:The poetry, innate, untold,Of being only four years old.”

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

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?

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

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

When you sell a man a book you dont 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 - theres all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

Thats what this country needs -- more books!

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

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

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.

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 dont 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!

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.

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.

When you sell a man a book you dont sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

Even the most innocent of mens 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.