Abbey > Abbey's Quotes

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon.”
― Roger Zelazny

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Life's a quest - A long search for something we can't name; something we want and usually can't get. We don't know precisely what it is - all we know is that we don't get it. What a fellow needs is something in which he can lose himself when everything else is a mess.”
― Peter Ruber, The Last Bookman

“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.”
― Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels

“And who shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold?”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“After all, when you come across the word prothalamium and find it means a preliminary nuptial song and a yaffle is a green woodpecker-well, I ask you! You cannot let matters rest there-or can you? Peradventure you will develop into lexicomaniacs.”
― E. Norman Torry

“A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single shelf better society and far more select company than all the drawing-rooms of Europe, America, and South Africa.”
― E. Norman Torry, Round My Library Fire: A Book about Books

“Well, I've always read in bed, in early years by candlelight, succeeded by lamplight, gaslight, and now electric light, and I'll probably be found dead there with some ponderous tome or book of poems on my chest and a seraphic smile of peace and contentment smoothing out all the ugliness of my visage...”
― E. Norman Torry, Round My Library Fire: A Book about Books

“A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.”
― E. Norman Torry, Round My Library Fire: A Book about Books

“Old books, yes! They are the true comforters; and principally because they are old and familiar. Many excellent new tales and poems and dramas are added yearly to the catalogues, and and some of these in time will stand beside the great companions under discussion; but only Time (and you and I and all other lovers of good books) will bring about their survival.”
― Vincent Starrett, Books Alive

“Superficially it may appear that I am more interested in books than in people; but I think it nearer the mark to say that I am more interested in people as they are revealed to me in books than as they reveal themselves to me in daily contact.”
― Vincent Starrett, Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence

“Book collecting! First editions and best editions; old books and new books - the ones you like and want to have around you. Thousands of 'em. I've had more honest satisfaction and happiness collecting books than anything else I've ever done in life.”
― Peter Ruber, The Last Bookman

“My second meeting with Vincent Starrett began on a cool Sunday afternoon in May of 1962. After a short interlude, he returned from the kitchen precariously balancing a large cup of tea on a very small saucer. It was the largest tea cup I had ever seen, large enough to startle, I am inclined to suspect, even the Mad Hatter in 'Alice in Wonderland.”
― Peter Ruber, The Last Bookman

“Well, let me try again,' he said. 'If it be true, and no doubt it is, that the proper study of mankind is man, it is also true that man is best studied in the books that he has written about himself; and all books, whatever their subject matter, are in essence autobiographical... Wherefore, it is clear - or is it? - that writers of books are what I have called them, the most fascinating people in the world.”
― Peter Ruber, The Last Bookman

“Grant Allen once said that an Englishman's idea of God was another Englishman twelve feet high, and I suppose that is more or less everybody's idea of God- with the necessary geographical adjustment. Zenith Brown has an idea about God that pleases me. 'God,' says Mrs. Brown, 'is obviously a friendly enough Old Gentleman most of the time, Who wishes us well and tries to see to it that we are reasonably happy. It is equally obvious the He has an idiot brother who takes over the reins whenever God Himself goes fishing. It is when the idiot brother is in charge of things that the world goes wrong and we have wars, famines, and pestilences on earth.”
― Vincent Starrett, Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence

“No book, however good, should ever be read as a task. If you do so read a book, it is very likely that you will not only get nothing out of it but that you will have toward the book and its author a repugnance that is unwarranted.”
― Burton Rascoe, The Joys of Reading: Life's Greatest Pleasure

“If you open a book and find that the writer is trying to impress you with his knowledge of long, unusual words or by his use of foreign phrases, close the book quickly with no sense of loss or of deficiency or of having missed anything; for the author has not learned how to write and perhaps never will, and there is no need for you to offer yourself as a sounding board for his incompetence.”
― Burton Rascoe, The Joys of Reading: Life's Greatest Pleasure

“Buy books, then, that you have read with profit and pleasure and hope to read and reread. Buy books that you may underscore passages and write upon the margins, thus assuring yourself that the book is your own. Keep the books that mean the most to you close at hand, one or two, if possible, on a table at your bedside. Do not hide away your favorite books or keep them locked in enclosed shelves. Do not keep them under glass.”
― Burton Rascoe, The Joys of Reading: Life's Greatest Pleasure

“Each of us, desperately clutching his identity amid the impalatable onward pour of Time and Thought, finds only in art-and chiefly in written art- means to halt that ceaseless, cruel drift.”
― Christopher Morley, The Powder of Sympathy

“Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.”
― Christopher Morley, Ex Libris Carissimis

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There are few finer or more innocent pleasures than talking books to one who knows. There may be joy in heaven- I am told there is- but the evidence is not conclusive, and I'll take mine here in my library.”
― A. Edward Newton, This Book Collecting Game

“Whenever we read a book we love, we change it, to some extent. We read into it our own interpretations, and the meanings which the words have taken on in our time. If a book is so rigid that it cannot lend itself to these fluctuations, it is useful only while it seems strictly true, and afterwards it is completely out of date.”
― John Erskine, The Delight of Great Books

“It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.”
― John Erskine

“In the Fourth Eclogue also Vergil has still the enthusiasm of youth. Few poems are so rich in magnificent lines or in stirring hopes... His hope is for a golden age in which there shall be no toil, no commerce, no sorrow, yet he still wants a high development of the intellectual life, the speculations of science, the practical application of knowledge.”
― John Erskine, The Delight of Great Books

“Blessings upon the head of Daniel Charles Solander, a botanist of distinction, who after extensive travels became a "Keeper" in the British Museum. He invented the leather case which bears his name, a box in the exact shape of a book, in which some precious volume may be kept when placed upon one's shelves.”
― A. Edward Newton, This Book Collecting Game

“I hold that book-collecting is the best of indoor sports, and I think I can provide proof; at any rate, I shall try.”
― A. Edward Newton, This Book Collecting Game

“Some delightful inscriptions are found in second-hand books. One, the most famous of all, may be found in every bookshop in the nation, repeated in a thousand and one volumes with only a single change of phrase in each. It is this: '______, with love from Momma.”
― Vincent Starrett, Books and Bipeds