Best 15 quotes of Deborah Meyler on MyQuotes

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

But in this case,” he continues, tracing the line of the plasterwork with one finger, “I feel that there is one cliché 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People write for ego gratification, not money.

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.

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.

Used" is such an odd word, so much stranger than "second-hand." A prefix for condoms, and there's a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those.

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.

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

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.