Top 100 On The Shelf Quotes
#1. Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.
Jeanette Winterson
#2. The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe ...
William Lane Craig
#3. I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us.
Jerry Herman
#4. Limit your day to what you feel comfortable with doing - put the rest on the shelf - for further consideration down the line.
Art Hochberg
#5. At the end of the day, it's all about what's on the shelf at the end of the year.
Steve Coppell
#6. He feels like saying that of course there's lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time.
Margaret Atwood
#7. More than fifty-five years ago my father told me, "The Bible does not belong on the shelf but in your hand, under your eye, and in your heart."
Martin Niemoller
#8. All these perfect days, made of glass Put on the shelf where they can cast perfect shadows that stretch and grow on the imperfect days down below ... perfect shadows that shift and glow ... perfect shadows that shift and grow ... " "Sam singing on page 256 of Linger.
Maggie Stiefvater
#9. We are all a volume on the shelf of the ... library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands.
Deb Caletti
#10. The worst thing about me is that I'll buy albums and put them away on the shelf and forget that I've got them.
Bernie Taupin
#11. My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
Jorge Luis Borges
#12. We can't have it both ways. We can't expect God to protect us in a crisis and just leave Him over there on the shelf in our day-to-day living. I wonder if sometimes He isn't waiting for us to wake up, He isn't maybe running out of patience.
Ronald Reagan
#13. Thus is the nature of love: that you must use it! A love unused is not love! If it is something that sits on the shelf that you don't know what to do with, it is not true to the nature of love! Use love!
C. JoyBell C.
#14. Love isn't an act, it's a whole life.
It's staying with [them] now because [they] need you; it's knowing you ... will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and futures - when all that's on the shelf and done with.
Brian Moore
#15. Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have knocked over and spilled on everything.
Charles P. Pierce
#16. I had so many songs that were actually sort of finished. And I deleted them. I wrote on my website that I'd put them on the shelf, but that wasn't true. I actually deleted them from my computer. I got sort of trigger-happy and I think I deleted about 200 songs from my computer.
Jens Lekman
#17. Keep playing games. Make time to play games with your friends and family, because it's surprisingly heartbreaking to wipe a thin layer of dust off a game you love, before you put it back on the shelf because the real world is calling you.
Wil Wheaton
#18. I know the names of the books - their old covers bleached to palest greens or pinks by the endless cycle of summers - lined up on the shelf.
Harriet Lane
#19. A unit of documentation. There are always three or more on a given item. One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The information you need is in the others.
Raymond Simard
#20. If you don't include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society ... So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That's a problem.
Lee Kuan Yew
#21. Look to Jesus this Christmas. Receive the reconciliation that he bought. Don't put it on the shelf unopened. And don't open it and then make it a means to all your other pleasures. Open it and enjoy the gift. Rejoice in him. Make him your pleasure. Make him your treasure.
John Piper
#22. Our philosophy is that if it was grown on a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, leave it on the shelf.
Rick Warren
#23. People are best on records and books because you can turn them off or put them back on the shelf.
Henry Rollins
#24. copy instead of finding the book on the shelf. And the finding is half the fun. Browsing on either side, above and below, that is the joy of it.
Mary Jane Hathaway
#25. Pharmaceutical projects are like fresh fruit - they depreciate if they are not tended to, and they do poorly if sitting on the shelf with long periods of inactivity.
Robert Burns
#26. Why do you have a picture of my mentor, Siri, on the shelf above your fireplace? - Evaline.
...
That's not your mentor... That's my mother, Desiree. - Mina
Colleen Gleason
#27. ... suffice to say, joy is where you find it- usually on the shelf right next to sadness.
Ingrid Schaffner
#28. You got me sitting on the shelf, while you're out bewitching someone else.
Jimi Hendrix
#29. Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that's when she turns into a 'Christmas Cake'. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf.
Andrew Davidson
#30. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#31. Most people probably don't even know what toothpaste they buy; they just recognize the box on the shelf.
Charles Duhigg
#32. Man what's the point of living if I'm living for myself
Lord empty out my life before I put you on the shelf
LeCrae
#33. Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns.
Hilary Mantel
#34. Every heart has a story to tell. Some dreams have wings, some are torn at the seams and just sit there on the shelf. If you were to walk in my shoes, you would see that we are all the same. So find the love inside yourself because every heart has a story to tell.
Sara Haze
#35. I'm not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten.
Richard Scarry
#36. I can get any retail buyer on the phone with you and get them to verify that not a single retail location in America where there's a PlayStation 3 on the shelf for sale. They've all been sold in a matter of minutes.
Jack Tretton
#37. I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.
Peter Abrahams
#38. Shut up. You don't have to buy a pair of shoes just because you tried them on. They may look great sitting on the shelf, but that doesn't mean they won't feel like medieval torture devices on your feet once you wear them around for a few days. It's the same thing with me. (Lisa)
Cherrie Lynn
#39. When you go to a movie, you don't care for one Oscar, really. Do you care if a guy got a Oscar on the shelf or is it a good movie? And, you don't care how much the movie made.
Ice Cube
#40. You don't have body parts there do you?" my mother interrupted. "I don't want to open the fridge and find a head on the shelf" Rodney laughed. "No Justina, it doesn't look like Jeffrey Dahmer's hideaway.
Jeaniene Frost
#41. After a year, the aromatics in an olive oil are gone. Sometimes the bottles on the shelf in the supermarket are there a lot longer than you are.
Jose Andres
#42. So those pills that offered painless relief stayed stored on the shelf, out of the strength of her reach, high atop the altar of platitudes.
J.R. Hamantaschen
#43. Relations are errors that Nature makes. / Your spouse you can put on the shelf. / But your friends, dear friends, are the quaint mistakes / You always commit yourself.
Phyllis McGinley
#44. Most of my colleagues have research awards on the shelf. I have party invites.
Anita Elberse
#45. Whenever I feel like this, I am gentle with myself, pretend like I'm someone else, someone good. I walk on eggshells around myself, like I'm some fragile piece of porcelain you have to place quietly, deliberately back on the shelf.
Andrea Portes
#46. Plus she did that stupid "Elf on the Shelf" thing and moved it every morning. It took another minute, but he finally found the bendy little freak hanging from the garland around one of her windows.
Joanne Jaytanie
#47. She doesn't know any better, what a girl like her needs is a man with both his legs on the land. A man who will hold her down so that she doesn't fly away. She doesn't know yet that someone like you looks better on the shelf than in your hand.
Maggie Stiefvater
#48. Write the book you wish you could find on the shelf but can't.
Maggie Stiefvater
#49. Technology is like a fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes
Andrew Heller
#50. I looked at my hand resting on the shelf of the prop cabinet, thinking of the scars that were there whether anyone could see them or not.
Sara Zarr
#51. Only a certain number of people go to a store over the period of a year. When a person sees my record on the shelf, it eliminates someone else's record from being sold. It's about continuing to try to find new ways to sell records.
Roy Ayers
#52. My wife and I lived all alone,
contention was our only bone.
I fought with her, she fought with me,
and things went on right merrily.
But now I live here by myself
with hardly a damn thing on the shelf,
and pass my days with little cheer
since I have parted from my dear.
Robert Creeley
#53. It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
Erica Jong
#54. The nature of the beast is that film is a director's medium. It's not a Tracy Letts play, it's a John Wells film. 'August: Osage County,' as a play, is done. Written. On the shelf. It'll be performed in its entirety for years.
Tracy Letts
#55. In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology
Barack Obama
#56. I am always most excited about the newest material I am doing, and other songs get put back on the shelf or dropped.
Maria Muldaur
#57. Fictional boyfriends were way more satisfying, in my experience. They almost always said the right thing, and when you got bored with them, you just put them back on the shelf.
Eileen Cook
#58. I like to stack them up on the shelf and move them about and rearrange them according to new parameters-height, color, thickness, provenance, publisher, author's nationality, subject matter, likelihood that I will ever read them. Then I put them back the way they were.
Joe Queenan
#59. A long time ago, I heard a piece of advice that went something like "write the book you wish you could find on the shelf but can't." And that's what I do...
Maggie Stiefvater
#60. And it has to do with having no inventory or stockpiles on the shelf, but items arrive as you need to build your product. What that means is that it's much more difficult to actually find stockpiles of already built weapons.
Mitchell Reiss
#61. It is not proper, you being closeted up here with him
"
"Delphinia, don't be absurd. I am so firmly on the shelf that the maids are tempted to dust me.
Meredith Duran
#62. See, I'm not the type of writer that has 400 songs in a suitcase someplace on the shelf. I'm sort of a rise-to-the-occasion-type of writer, so when I know I'm going to record, I get in the mood to write.
Luther Vandross
#63. Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn't want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, "good book," as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.
Jack Gantos
#64. Super Troopers is hilarious. Everybody always thought we somehow - we did Reno way, way before any of us had seen Super Troopers. It sat on the shelf for a couple years.
Thomas Lennon
#65. I put the wine bottle on the counter and reached for a couple of wine glasses. "Would you like some? It's a fine vintage stock. I'm pretty sure it was on the shelf of the Piggly Wiggly for at least two weeks.
Denise Grover Swank
#66. Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.
Stella Gibbons
#67. Whites and pastels - colors suitable for a girl's come-out, though not always suited to the girls coming out - eddied erratically around gowns in every brilliant hue ladies married, widowed or on the shelf could imagine, and a few they ought not have.
Colleen Ladd
#68. Hair is gray and the firers are burning. So many dreams on the shelf. You say I wanted you to be proud of me. I always wanted that myself.
Tori Amos
#69. CUSTOMER: Do you have security cameras in here? BOOKSELLER: Yes. CUSTOMER: Oh. (customer slides a book out from inside his jacket and places it back on the shelf)
Jen Campbell
#70. I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall.
Augusten Burroughs
#71. The day Metallica's over, i'm not going to put an ad looking for another band. I'll put my drumsticks on the shelf and there's 14 other things I wanna try. Metallica's the only band I've ever been and it's the only I ever wanna be in.
Lars Ulrich
#72. From sunny woof and cloudy weft Fell rain in sheets; so, to myself I hummed these hazard rhymes, and left The learned volume on the shelf.
Alfred Austin
#73. When I'm not acting, I'm writing, building an inventory of scripts. Even if they sit on the shelf, I just keep stacking them up.
Dan Aykroyd
#74. A book in hand is worth ten on the shelf
Anonymous
#76. I do think I'm lucky I met Michael. Not just Michael Douglas the actor and producer with two Oscars on the shelf, but Michael Douglas, the love of my life. I really do think it was meant to happen.
Catherine Zeta-Jones
#77. I realized that you don't try on a pair of pants, fart in them, and then put them back on the shelf, and the same rough politeness applied here, too. Plain and simple, I bled on it, I bought it.
Laurie Notaro
#78. Write the book you've always wanted to read, but can't find on the shelf.
Maggie Stiefvater
#79. The rock sitting on the shelf has potential because it can fall-it's the same way with the Internet. It has this potential. It's not really doing it yet, but it's about to.
Michael Nesmith
#80. It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.
Joshua Mohr
#81. If I wait to be perfect before I love myself I will always be unsatisfied and ungrateful if I wait until all the flaws, chips, and cracks disappear I will be the cup that stands on the shelf and is never used
Joyce Rupp
#82. If they put you back on the shelf, in exchange for someone else, don't worry.
Someone better's coming along.
Pleasefindthis
#83. He looks at you like you're the last chocolate bar on the shelf and he would die without a chocolate fix.
Nora Roberts
#84. I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.
Rita Dove
#85. It dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle-age without ever being young, and that he was, in the nicest possible way, "on the shelf".
John Le Carre
#86. A scientist who is also a human being cannot rest while knowledge which might be used to reduce suffering rests on the shelf,
Albert Sabin
#87. My Lamb, you are so very small, You have not learned to read at all; Yet never a printed book withstands The urgence of your dimpled hands. So, though this book is for yourself, Let mother keep it on the shelf Till you can read. O days that pass, That day will come too soon, alas!
E. Nesbit
#88. At the end of the day, it's just grape juice. No one needs anything that I make. The last thing we need is another wine on the shelf. So that just makes me grateful for the people who do enjoy it.
Andre Hueston Mack
#89. Where did she come from, and where can I find one?" "Picked this one up at a gas station in West Virginia, bargain price. Last one on the shelf, sorry.
Alexandra Bracken
#90. Ji-li's deeply moving story should be on the shelf of every person's library. Her courage in the face of adversity and her steadfast loyalty and love for her family are truly inspirational for young and old alike.
Nien Cheng
#91. Aside from the fruit basket, the room was as empty as the inside of Dexter on the shelf marked SOUL.
Jeff Lindsay
#92. She loved the smell of books, the feel of books, the look of them on the shelf.
Barbara Michaels
#93. But don't you think there some stories that are more alive than that? When you put certain books back on the shelf, don't you feel as if the people inside are going on with their lives after the story is over?" Lucy felt that way about most of the books she loved.
Kristin Kladstrup
#94. Listen not to the critics who put their own dreams on the shelf.
Garth Brooks
#95. No one who worked in "Corrections" appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf.
Piper Kerman
#96. The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf.
Shirley Jackson
#97. A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.
Richard Peck
#98. I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.
Thomas Mallon
#99. When you were the son of evil, there was little you couldn't do, own, or kill, and yet her mortal self was an elusive trophy he could touch, but not put on his shelf.
This made her rare. This made her precious.
This made him ... love her.
J.R. Ward
#100. I imagined your stick, washing in the waves for hundreds of years, turning to driftwood, smooth and hard like stone. I imagined a little girl finding it on a beach so many years later. Saving it on her shelf, where she put the things that made her feel like the world was magical.
Ava Dellaira
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