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A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.

Christopher Morley

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Christopher Morley
Age: 66 †
Born: 1890
Born: May 5
Died: 1957
Died: March 28
Journalist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Writer
Bryn Mawr
Pennsylvania
Critics
Gongs
Train
Vainly
Goes
Railroad
Religion
Loudly
Railroads
Crossing
Crossings
Clanging
Critic
Gong

More quotes by Christopher Morley

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Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.
Christopher Morley
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There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Christopher Morley
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Be prepared for truth at all hours and in the most fantastic disguises. This is the only safety.
Christopher Morley
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The everlasting lure of round-the-corner, how fascinating it is.
Christopher Morley
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What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.
Christopher Morley
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The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen and actors at 11 o'clock in the morning.
Christopher Morley
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Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.
Christopher Morley
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The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
Christopher Morley
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April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.
Christopher Morley
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Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.
Christopher Morley
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New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
Christopher Morley
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There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.
Christopher Morley
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Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
Christopher Morley
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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.
Christopher Morley
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The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.
Christopher Morley
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The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.
Christopher Morley
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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.
Christopher Morley
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I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind and it didn't seem to matter.
Christopher Morley
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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.
Christopher Morley
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Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
Christopher Morley