Carolyn Wells Quotes
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I think, for the rest of my life, I shall refrain from looking up things. It is the most ravenous time-snatcher I know. You pull one book from the shelf, which carries a hint or a reference that sends you posthaste to another book, and that to successive others. It is incredible, the number of books you hopefully open and disappointedly close, only to take down another with the same result.
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What is a magazine? A small body of Literature entirely surrounded by advertisements.
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Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive.
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To take pride in a library kills it. Then, its motive power shifts over to the critical if admiring visitor, and apologies are necessary and acceptable and the fat is in the fire.
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'Tis blessed to bestow, and yet, Could we bestow the gifts we get, And keep the ones we give away, How happy were our Christmas day!
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Contentment is the result of a limited imagination.
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The wages of sin is alimony.
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When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.
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I hate to do what everybody else is doing. Why, only last week, on Fifth Avenue and some cross streets, I noticed that every feminine citizen of these United States wore an artificial posy on her coat or gown. I came home and ripped off every one of the really lovely refrigerator blossoms that were sewn on my own bodices.
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... ideals, standards, aspirations,--those are chameleon words, and take color from their speakers,--often false tints. A scholarly man of my acquaintance once told me that he traveled a thousand miles into the desert to get away from the word uplift, and it was the first word he heard after he reached his destination.
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I love the Christmas-tide, and yet, I notice this, each year I live; I always like the gifts I get, But how I love the gifts I give!
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Where there's a will there's a detective story.
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A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye.
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Wall Street. - The abode of the Brokers and the Broke.
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At times there is nothing so unnatural as nature.
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... as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the ideal library is in the wish of its maker.
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One of the first principles of perseverance is to know when to stop persevering.
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We should live and learn; but by the time we've learned, it's too late to live.
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Insistent advice may develop into interference, and interference, someone has said, is the hind hoof of the devil.
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A fool and his money are soon married.
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Advice ... is a habit-forming drug. You give a dear friend a bit of advice today, and next week you find yourself advising two or three friends, and the week after, a dozen, and the week following, crowds!
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... the subjective viewpoint is the only one to use regarding a library. Your true library is a collection of the books you want.You may have deplorably poor taste or bad judgment. Never mind. Correct those traits before you exchange your books.
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The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy The books that people talk about we never can recall And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.
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There are many ways of discarding books. You can give them to friends,--or enemies,--or to associations or to poor Southern libraries. But the surest way is to lend them. Then they never come back to bother you.