Michelle Sheets > Michelle's Quotes

“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, The Haunted Bookshop

“There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career―it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and makes you read it.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“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, The Haunted Bookshop

“Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar