Christopher Morley on reading

If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

There is only one success⁠—to be able to spend your life in your own way.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain1835–1910Quoting or paraphrasing a Professor Winchester in “Disappearance of Literature”, speech at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, 20 November 1900, in Mark Twain’s Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 194

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Mark Twain1835–1910

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Writing