Quotes from Christopher Morley

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

A town that has no ceiling price, A town of double-talk; A town so big men name her twice, Like so: 'N'Yawk, N'Yawk.'

We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.

Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution ... is, as far as possible, to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices; simply to do what you find yourself doing; to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible; to allow things to settle themselves, as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty.

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried, unresisting, with the current. They float through easy days. They live, unquestioning, in the moment.

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

My prayer is that what we have gone through [World War One] will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life, animal as well as human.

Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

Men talk of "finding God," but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest hiding-place, your heart. You yourself are a part of Him.

People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.

It is curious how a man can stamp his personality upon earthly things.

Did you think Beauty was so easy and merry a companion? Perhaps you were confusing Beauty with Having a Good Time.

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

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Man, bitterly examined, is merely a vehicle for units of nourishing combustion...

And it is as grandmothers that our mothers come into the fullness of their grace. When a man's mother holds his child in her gladdened arms he is aware (with some instinctive sense of propriety) of the roundness of life's cycle; of the mystic harmony of life's ways.

The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.

God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.

Put all your faith in poets. You will find few others to share Beauty with you; and it cannot be borne alone.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads to madness. The poet is the Pandora of the mind.

A poet is a reporter, interviewing his own heart.

And the poet out-argues Nature.