Explore Quotes by Mary Ann Shaffer

Will Thisbee gave me The Beginner's Cook-Book for Girl Guides. It was just the thing; the writer assumes you know nothing about cookery and writes useful hints - "When adding eggs, break the shells first.

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.

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

His writings have made me his friend.

I believe I am becoming pathetic. I'll go further, I believe that I am in love with a flower-growing, wood-carving quarryman/carpenter/pig farmer. In fact, I know I am. Perhaps tomorrow I will become entirely miserable at the thought that he doesn't love me back - may, even, care for Remy- but at this precise moment I am succumbing to euphoria. My head and stomach feel quite odd.

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

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

Moses: God or crowd control?!?

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

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

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

Isn't that something-to know your own soul by hearsay, instead of its own tidings? Why should I let a preacher tell me if I had one or not? If I could believe I hada soul, all by myself, then I could listen to its tidings all by myself.

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

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

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)!

I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers-- booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one-- the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it-- along with first dibs on the new books.

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

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

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 much prefer whining to counting my blessings.

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