Quotes by Mary Ann Shaffer

Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.

I think you learn more if youre laughing at the same time.

What on earth did you say to Isola? She stopped in on her way to pick up Pride and Prejudice and to berate me for never telling her about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Why hadnt she known there were better love stories around? Stories not riddled with ill-adjusted men, anguish, death and graveyards!

Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that persons name suddenly pops up everywhere you go? My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace. He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and fruitfulness is drawn in.

Then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.

Thats what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. Its geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)

I did not throw The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.

She is one of those ladies who is more beautiful at sixty than she could possibly have been at twenty. (how I hope someone says that about me someday)!

Now that I think about it, maybe he is a werewolf. I can picture him lunging over the moors in hot pursuit of his prey, and Im certain that he wouldnt think twice about eating an innocent bystander. Ill watch him closely at the next full moon. Hes asked me to go dancing tomorrow--perhaps I should wear a high collar. Oh, thats vampires, isnt it? I think I am a little giddy. (After meeting Mr. Markham V. Reynolds, Jr.)

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

I did not want to spend my time reading about people who never were, doing things they never did.

I dont want to be married just to be married. I cant think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I cant talk to, or worse, someone I cant be silent with.

All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, whats good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But its a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.

I dont know as much about children as I would like to. I am godmother to a wonderful three-year-old boy named dominic, the son of my friend Sophie. They live in Scotland, near Oban, and I dont get to see him often. I am always astonished, when I do, at his increasing personhood - no sooner had I gotten used to carrying about a warm lump of baby that he stopped being one started scurrying around on his own. I missed six months, and lo and behold, he learned how to talk! Now he talks to himself, which I find terribly endearing since I do, too.

Yesterday, Amelia and Kit came over for supper, and we took a blanket down to the beach afterward to watch the moon rise. Kit loves to do that, but she always falls asleep before it is fully rise, and I carry her home to Amelias house. She is certain shell be able to stay awake all night as soon as shes five.

I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them—and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words the bright day is done and we are for the dark, I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance—instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.