Christopher Darlington Morley (1890–1957) was an American novelist, essayist, and journalist. He authored more than 50 books, which are diverse but integrated by Morley’s personality.
Born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Morley was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford’s New College 1910–13. He worked on Doubleday’s editorial staff 1913–17. He gained fame from his contributions to periodicals such as Ladies’ Home Journal, the New York Evening Post, and the Saturday Review of Literature.
Morley’s notable works, imaginative and lighthearted, include Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and its sequel The Haunted Bookshop (1919,) Thunder on the Left (1925,) Swiss Family Manhattan (1932,) Kitty Foyle (1939,) The Ironing Board (1949) and a book of poems, The Middle Kingdom (1944.)
Morley also edited Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1937 and 1948.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Christopher Morley
Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Life and Living, Life
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Criticism
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Decisions
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Knowledge, Originality, Reading, Mind, Thinking
There is only one success—to be able to spend your own life in your own way.
—Christopher Morley
Truth, like milk, arrives in the dark
But even so, wise dogs don’t bark.
Only mongrels make it hard
For the milkman to come up the yard.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Truth
The big shots are only the little shots who keep shooting.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Resolve, Success & Failure, Endurance, Persistence, Success, Perseverance
No man is lonely while eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Eating, Food, Attention
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.
—Christopher Morley
Such little, puny things are words in rhyme: poor feeble loops and strokes as frail as hairs.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Words
A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Romance
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
Topics: Heaven
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Goals, Life, Happiness, Aspirations
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
Topics: Humor, Awareness, Perspective
To hear the addled citizens at their mirth—their lewd and lackwit innocent noble mirth.
—Christopher Morley
When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Books
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Water, Crying
Big shots are little shots who kept shooting.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Work, Success, Leadership
If we discovered that we had only 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.
—Christopher Morley
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Dance, Dancing
New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Cities, City Life
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
—Christopher Morley
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Dogs, Genius
April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Seasons
We’ve had bad luck with our kids—they’ve all grown up.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Children
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
The enemies of the truth are always awfully nice.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Truth
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
Topics: Realism
Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.
—Christopher Morley
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Fashion
God made man merely to hear some praise of what he’d done on those Five Days.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Creation
If a relationship is to evolve, it must go through a series of endings.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beginning
The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Childhood
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Enemy, Enemies
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Earth
The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Poets, Poetry
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Wildlife
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Universe, Religion
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Books
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Carl Bernstein American Journalist
H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison American Journalist
Walt Whitman American Poet
G. K. Chesterton English Journalist
Henry Adams American Historian
Theodore H. White American Journalist
James Agee American Man of Letters
Italo Calvino Italian Novelist, Writer