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Parnassus on Wheels QUOTES

Parnassus on Wheels QUOTES

1 " A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

2 " The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

3 " Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

4 " 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

5 " I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small--like looking at the Big Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

6 " There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

7 " Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

8 " Calling us men doesn't make us men. No creature on earth has a right to think himself a human being if he doesn't know at least one good book. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

9 " What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content—all the great things in life are done by discontented people. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

10 " Oh, silly woman! Leave your stove, your pots and pans and chores, even if only for one day! Come out and see the sun in the sky and the river in the distance! "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

11 " That's when a woman finds herself--when she's in love. I don't care if she is old or fat or homely or prosy. She feels that little flutter under her ribs and she drops from the tree like a ripe plum. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

12 " . . .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. . . "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

13 " Lord!" he said, "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. Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom huckster, people would run to the gate when I came by — just waiting for my stuff. And here I go loaded with everlasting salvation — yes, ma'am, salvation for their little, stunted minds — and it's hard to make 'em see it. That's what makes it worth while — I'm doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. It's a new field, but by the bones of Whitman, it's worth while. That's what this country needs — more books! "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

14 " As far as I can see, a man who's fond of books never need starve! "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

15 " I have always suffered from the feeling that it's better to read a good book than to write a poor one; and I've done so much mixed reading in my time that my mind is full of echoes and voices of better men. But this book I'm worrying about now really deserves to be written, I think, for it has a message of its own. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

16 " I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small—like looking at the Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

17 " Talkers never write. They go on talking." There "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

18 " It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

19 " Everywhere, as we go about our small business, we must discern the fingerprints of the gigantic plan, the orderly and inexorable routine with neither beginning nor end, in which death is but a preface to another birth, and birth the certain forerunner of another death. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels

20 " I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvellous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small-- like looking at the Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you. "

― Christopher Morley , Parnassus on Wheels