Best 24 quotes of Sheridan Hay on MyQuotes

Ageing is a process of exchanging hope for insight

Books aren't lumps of paper, but minds on shelves.

I drink to not giving a damn . . .

Remember, a book is always a gift.

The books housed in one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become

A book was like a drawer: one opened it and notions flew out.

And when I think of my few acquisitions, I have to admit how fiercely the autodidact struggles for her education, and how incomplete that education remains. How illusory is any accumulation of knowledge!

Art opens the fishiest eye . . .

book collecting is only meaningful if it’s personal,” Oscar clarified. “If it’s just another way of accumulating wealth instead of for the books themselves it isn’t right. Collectors are trying to protect themselves. To separate themselves. It’s a hierarchy.

Don't be a martyr to your imagination.

He lit his pipe, and the match head in that room of paper and leather flared up like an idea.

He wanted to limit me to his own investigation of who I was . . .

I had the sense that cities were yielding, that they moved over and made room.

I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves.

I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.

Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.

Looking up into the trees, I noticed that one still had a few dark leaves clinging to the upper branches. Under my gaze, the leaves became a semé of birds, scattering upward and away in a salutary swoop, leaving only a plastic bag, caught and hanging listlessly in the bare limbs.

no one knew my name, and my anonymity was at times a raw joy in my chest, freedom at its most literal, while at others, a source of paralyzing fear.

Peculiar to Sydney, in those days, was a single word written in chalk in beautiful, looping copperplate on street corners. Sydney was known for it, the word chalked at the feet of the inhabitants and visitors, like a letter consisting of a lone word, but personally addressed to each member of a crowd. . . . It says ‘Eternity,’ love. . . . A man has been writing that word in chalk for thirty years. It’s famous now.

some letters one really writes to oneself; some letters just describe what it is we hope will be returned.

There’s so much love sent through the mail.

To a true collector, the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth,” Oscar quoted, absent self-consciousness.

Yes, surprising, isn’t it?” he said. . . . “You’d think everyone would ask for what they want and there’d be hundreds of tailors catering to specification. But most people don’t know what they want.

You might want to consider the whole thing from a man’s perspective. One’s own point of view, Rosemary, is inevitably limited.