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1 " If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity. "
― Paul Collins , Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
2 " It really is an APPALLING thing to think of the people who have no books...It is only by books that most men and women can lift themselves above the sordidness of life. No books! Yet for the greater part of humanity that is the common lot. We may, in fact, divide our fellow-creatures into two branches - those who read books and those who do not. "
3 " Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg. "
― Paul Collins
4 " Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. … But autism … is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an over-expression of the very traits that make our species unique. "
― Paul Collins , Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism
5 " Generally, when a man is rabidly for one cause, and then is just as rabidly for another cause, it is not because he loves the cause: it is because he loves the rabies "
― Paul Collins , The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
6 " Leatherbound books are an expensive form of wallpaper, and yet every English nobleman’s home seems to have had them. Their endless sets of the works of Cooper and Scott and Goethe, in finely tanned bindings with marbled endpapers, all end up with this sort of dealer sooner or later. I look through a set of Cooper and, without surprise, find uncut pages: these books were never actually read. "
7 " Such madness was strictly prohibited in New York, but not in New Jersey. "
― Paul Collins , Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery
8 " …I had a good title already. My book was originally called Loser: A Brief History of Notable Failures. But American publishers don’t like this. Losing is a bad thing in our country. It’s not allowed. "
9 " What you mean to find matters less than what you do find. "
10 " You see, literary culture is perpetually dead and dying; and when some respected writer discovers and loudly proclaims the finality of this fact, it is a forensic marker of their own decomposition. It means that they have artistically expired within the last ten years, and that they will corporeally expire within the next twenty. "
11 " Back then, Manhattan was the infant country "
12 " I been brought up a hatter,” he sighed, “people would have come into the world without heads. "
13 " Even the few streets with unobstructed brick sidewalks were comically narrow—just wide enough, as one chronicler put it, to accommodate “two lean men to walk abreast or one fat man alone. "
14 " So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre. "
― Paul Collins , Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living
15 " On the morning of his funeral, the Baltimore Sun failed to announce the service, but mourned that his death “will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it. "
16 " At five that morning, Edgar Allan Poe met the fate anticipated in his poem “To Annie”: Thank Heaven! the crisis— The danger is past, And the lingering illness, Is over at last— And the Fever called ‘Living’ Is conquer’d at last. "
17 " It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his “prose poem,” Eureka. “The Raven” was indeed Poe’s most famous work during his lifetime, and time has not lessened its charms—but as art it is distinctly backward-looking. "
18 " New York was the swing state in the upcoming presidential election—and Manhattan was the swing district in New York State. Control the city, and you controlled the 1800 presidential race. "
19 " If every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument,” Doyle later mused, “it would be such as would dwarf the pyramids. "
20 " And yet something unsettling remained about the notion of John Pastano as a willful murderer: the recollection, perhaps, that after murdering Mary Castro, he had filled his hat with her blood and wandered out into the street with it. When he was collared over by the Tea-Water Pump, broken English had spilled out from the man. “Why you catch me?” he asked innocently. “Me not do "
