Book by Book Quotes

“As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.”
― Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life

“Many people feel most alive, most fulfilled, when they violate the dictates of conscience or even the promptings of their own self interest.”
― Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life

“I’m ninety-four years . . . and my mind is just a turmoil of regrets. ... In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what’s the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can’t hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face of that woman so clear it hurts, and there’s never a day passes I don’t think about her, and there’s never a day passes I don’t curse myself. “What kind of a timid, dried up, weevily fellow were you?” I say to myself. “You should’ve said to hell with what’s right and what’s wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You’d have something to remember, you’d be happier now.” She’s out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she’s been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing left but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two.—Joseph Mitchell”
― Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life