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...”

“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.”

“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 don't kno...”

“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 b...”

“We call a child's mind 'small' simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.”

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

“A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.”

“Man, an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.”

“Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late?”

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.”

“If we discovered that we only had 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.”

“Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.”

“Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.”

“My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.”

“It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.”

“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.”

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

“Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.”

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