Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on the Explosive Power of Books)

"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.”— American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on Conversation Among Three Versus Two)

“Very often conversations are better among three than between two, for the reason that then one of the trio is always, unconsciously, acting as umpire, interposing fair play, recalling wandering wits to the nub of the argument, seeing that the aggressiveness of one does no foul to the reticence of another. Talk in twos may, alas! fall into speaker and listener: talk in threes rarely does so.” — American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), “What Men Live By,” in Mince Pie (1919)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on Books’ ‘Instant and Irresistible’ Appeal)

“A queer thing about books, if you open your heart to them, is the instant and irresistible way they follow you with their appeal. You know at once, if you are clairvoyant in these matters (libre-voyant, one might say), when you have met your book. You may dally and evade, you may go on about your affairs, but the paragraph of prose your eye fell upon, or the snatch of verses, or perhaps only the spirit and flavour of the volume, more divined than reasonably noted, will follow you. A few lines glimpsed on a page may alter your whole trend of thought for the day, reverse the currents of the mind, change the profile of the city.” — American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), “On Visiting Bookshops,” in Pipefuls (1920)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on How There Is ‘Only One Success’)

"There is only one success: to be able to spend life in your own way and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it." —American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), Where the Blue Begins (1922)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on April’s ‘Green Traffic Light’)

“April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.” — American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), John Mistletoe (1931)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on How a Poem Finds ‘Its Place in the Language’)

“It takes time for any poem to grow and ripen and find its place in the language.  It will be for those of a hundred or more years hence to say what are the great poems of our present day.  If a sonnet has the true vitality in it, it will gather association and richness about it as it traces its slender golden path through the minds of readers.  It settles itself comfortably into the literary landscape, incorporates itself subtly into the unconscious thought of men, becomes corpuscular in the blood of the language.  It comes down to us in the accent of those who have loved and quoted it, invigorated by our subtle sense of the permanent rightness of its phrasing and our knowledge of the pleasure it has given to thousands of others.  The more it is quoted, the better it seems.” — American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), “The Permanence of Poetry,” in Plum Pudding (1921)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on 'Fall Fever')

“Fall fever is (in our case at any rate) more insidious than the familiar disease of spring. Spring fever impels us to get out in the country; to seize a knotted cudgel and a pouchful of tobacco and agitate our limbs over the landscape. But the drowsiness of autumn is a lethargy in the true sense of that word—a forgetfulness. A forgetfulness of past discontents and future joys; a forgetfulness of toil that is gone and leisure to come; a mere breathing existence in which one stands vacantly eyeing the human scene, living in a gentle simmer of the faculties like a boiling kettle when the gas is turned low.” —Christopher Morley, “Fall Fever,” in Pipefuls (1920)

(The photograph was taken at the creek near my house in Englewood, NJ.)