Mary Ann Shaffer Quotes

Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don't ever let anyone tell you different.

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.

I think you learn more if you're laughing at the same time.

The first rule of snooping is to come at it sideways.

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

one year as his wife, and id have become one of those abject, quaking women who look at their husbands when someone asks them a question. I've always despised that type, but I see how it happens now

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

My worries travel around in my head on their well worn path

I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art - be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music - enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.

Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on.

If there is Predestination, then God is the devil. by Remy, Ravensbruck concentration camp survivor

She is one of those ladies who is more beautiful at sixty than she could possibly have been at twenty. (how I hope someone says that about me someday)!

Treat a dog right and he'll treat you right - he'll keep you company, be your friend, never ask you no questions. Cats is different, but I never held that against them.

‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.

Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.

Then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.

Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)

Miss X has always been a ditherer -- she was a ten month baby and has not improved in any material way since then.

I much prefer whining to counting my blessings.

I don't want to be married just to be married.

I sometimes think I prefer suitors in books rather than right in front of me. How awful, backward, cowardly, and mentally warped that will be if it turns out to be true.

I don’t know whether to feel flattered or hunted.

Light griefs are loquacious, but the great are dumb.

People don't know how chickens can turn on you, but they can -- just like mad dogs.

Women like poetry. A soft word in their ears and they melt - a grease spot on the grass.

Moses: God or crowd control?!?

Do you suppose the St. Swithin's furnace-man was my one true love? Since I never spoke to him, it seems unlikely, but at least it was a passion unscathed by disappointment.

I am to cover the philosophical side of the debate and so far my only thought is that reading keeps you from going gaga.

After all, what's good enough for Austen ought to be good enough for anyone.

Your questions regarding that gentleman are very delicate, very subtle, very much like being smacked in the head with a mallet...it's a tuba among the flutes.

He had no imagination either-fatal for one engaged in child-rearing

In a good mood I call my hair Chestnut with Gold Glints. In a bad mood, I call it mousy brown

This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.

Those times, I tried to think of something happy, something I'd liked - but not something I loved, for that made it worse.

Isola doesn't approve of small talk and believes in breaking the ice by stomping on it.

His writings have made me his friend.

Reading keeps you from going ga-ga.

We read books, talked books, argued over books and became dearer and dearer to one another.

Humour is the best way to make the unbearable bearable.

All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.

But the truth is that I'm gloomy - gloomier than I ever was during the war. Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people.

Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

He's got that way of believing his opinion is the truth, but he's not disagreeable about it. He's too sure he's right to bother being disagreeable.

Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of - hope? Happiness? Something like them, at any rate.

Boredom is a powerful reason, and the prospect of fun is a powerful draw - especially when you are young.

I did not throw 'The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation' at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.

I did not want to spend my time reading about people who never were, doing things they never did.