Deborah Meyler Quotes & Sayings

Things didn't seem promising initially. I arrived like everyone else did, after swearing that I wasn't a spy or guilty of moral turpitude, and that I hadn't got any snails. In the first, bewildering minutes outside JFK, on a Friday night in the rain, I stared out at veering yellow cabs, airport staff screaming abuse at cowboy operators, sleek limos nosing along the bedlam, the whole teetering on the brink of chaos. I thought, as many people do, This is impossible. I won't be able to manage this. But then, we do manage- we manage to get into the city without being murdered, and wake up the next day still alive, and shortly afterwards we are striding down Broadway in the sun. — Deborah Meyler

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you take into account ebooks and Kindles and such, we're doing pretty good. — Deborah Meyler

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

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

But in this case," he continues, tracing the line of the plasterwork with one finger, "I feel that there is one cliche that sums up my position so admirably that it would be pure egotism to attempt a more interesting periphrasis. Plain speaking, therefore, there is to be.
"There is undoubtedly a strong possibility, notwithstanding the vagaries of contingency and misfortune, that my son might
have fallen - or might, we could say, have voluntarily jumped, in accordance with the ethical codes with which he has been brought up - for a play you have made with some success, although, as I am persuaded you would concede, very little originality."
Plain speaking if you're Henry James, perhaps. — Deborah Meyler

The Christmas trees are brought from Vermont by monosyllabic men in warm clothes; they seem alien, closer to the earth, silently contemptuous, like gypsies. They bring in their trees and stand them up on the pavements, so that swaths of Broadway are suddenly transformed into dark, pine-scented avenues. — Deborah Meyler

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

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

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

I finish a short afternoon shift that I spent learning about book descriptions with George. It is an arcane system that the Internet is putting paid to, where fair is foul and good is bad and perfect means you are a charlatan. Price-clipped is bad. Second impression is bad. Inscribed is bad, unless it is by the author, and then inscribed is good, but nearly as good as signed. Unless the inscription is to someone patently important - To my dear Laura, love from Petrarch. — Deborah Meyler

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

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

It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well. — Deborah Meyler

One age might pass over what another prized, and the next age might then revere it — Deborah Meyler

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

I find over the next few days that acceptance is the way to go. You have to bend your mind around from the path it has always taken to a path where your own direction does not matter. You are there for someone else. It is easier if you don't struggle against that, if you simply bow your head down to it, acquiesce, comply, love. — Deborah Meyler

I love to slip into the bookstore. It is my haven. I don't have to prove myself there. — Deborah Meyler

Used" is such an odd word, so much stranger than "secondhand." A prefix for condoms, and there's a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those. "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. I — Deborah Meyler

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

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

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

I like the fact that Americans all have kettles on the hobs of their ovens; nobody has an electric kettle. It seems connected to the frontier way of life; whether you're in a New York apartment building or you're keeping the coyotes away on the prairie - you need boiling water? Then you need a flame. — Deborah Meyler

People write for ego gratification, not money. — Deborah Meyler

Music is like poetry, It can stop you thinking. But it can also open you up. — Deborah Meyler

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

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

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

You know, what I've always done is take a look through a book, look at the paper stock, the printing, the publisher, the actual content, and, taking everything into account, I price it ... And now I can't. The fact that I can check this book ... - the fact that I can check this book on the Internet means that I have to check this book on the Internet. — Deborah Meyler