Deborah Meyler Quotes

#1. I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away.

Deborah Meyler

#2. Aristotle didn't have a problem with abortion," she says.
"Oh, well, good, that's a comfort," I say.

Deborah Meyler

#3. People write for ego gratification, not money.

Deborah Meyler

#4. Music is like poetry, It can stop you thinking. But it can also open you up.

Deborah Meyler

#5. I don't need to buy books. I've got the whole of the library at the New School, as well as my iPad. Why do people still buy books? They just take up space.

Deborah Meyler

#6. When people say "to father," they generally mean that one biological act - the act of begetting a child. It is different with the verb "to mother." "To mother" implies care. A man's act of fathering can easily be that one seed sown; a woman's act of mothering can take up all the rest of her life. I

Deborah Meyler

#7. I never got int the library thing. I always liked that I could put my hand on a book when I wanted it. And to know I owned them; that was important too.

Deborah Meyler

#8. I say it, and even speaking such a dream is to offer it up for taint. As long as it is secret, closed, full of blood, it is inviolable. Now I've presented it for piercing. Mitchell

Deborah Meyler

#9. It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well.

Deborah Meyler

#10. I am not sure that there is a choice, or that there are ever choices. Everything that has happened leads up to the next thing. It can look like a choice, but the way we fall is always determined by what went before. So we can't choose. Stella

Deborah Meyler

#11. When you take into account ebooks and Kindles and such, we're doing pretty good.

Deborah Meyler

#12. I keep trying, and manage some workmanlike stuff that doesn't require inspiration, and then I check my phone, check my email, go on Facebook. I read other people's posts, make jaunty comments, flitter away the time, profane the time.

Deborah Meyler

#13. Used books, as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn't the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There's no such thing as a used book. Or there's no such thing as a book if it's not being used.

Deborah Meyler

#14. It's a nebulous thing, but it is my belief - my experience also - that women do not have the need to collect that men have.

Deborah Meyler

#15. I glance back as I am pulling the door shut. I can see Mrs. Kasperek on her bed, in the apartment denuded of the books that were all her life.

Deborah Meyler

#16. We're high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it's fleeting and evanescence. And we're getting worse
checking texts and emails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.

Deborah Meyler

#17. That thing that Hamlet says - "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so". Not quite true if you are stuck under a grand piano, not quite true for genocide, but surely it must be true about love?

Deborah Meyler

#18. These books ... , she begins, and stops. I am frightened for her, for myself decades from now, struggling to retain dignity with two strangers as they take away my books. I can see the straight line to her grave, to mine.

Deborah Meyler

#19. There is the smell, too, of course
the reassuring smell of paper, new paper, soft old paper, recalling each person to the first time they really did press their nose into a book.

Deborah Meyler

#20. I love to slip into the bookstore. It is my haven. I don't have to prove myself there.

Deborah Meyler

#21. I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn't, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It's a hindsight word.

Deborah Meyler

#22. I don't really see, but I like how his mind works in a different way from mine, in a way that could open mine up.

Deborah Meyler

#23. One age might pass over what another prized, and the next age might then revere it

Deborah Meyler

#24. I turn to Mrs. Kasperek; this feels urgent to me. Do you know what Caliban says when he wants to take away Prospero's magic? 'Remember, first to possess his books; for without them he's but a sot.

Deborah Meyler

#25. Another person closes you off from the world, but without anyone else there you are like a grain of pollen, vulnerable to or open to all these fleeting relationships. After

Deborah Meyler

#26. Americans have all these classes that mean they just know odd things, so engineers know about William Blake and poets know about analytical geometry. She probably took one on Aristotle and the politics of gender.

Deborah Meyler