Top 90 Mary Ann Shaffer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Real dyed-in-the-wool booksellers – like Sophie and me – can’t lie. Our faces are always a dead giveaway. A lifted brow or curled lip reveals that it’s a poor excuse for a book, and the clever customers ask for a recommendation instead, whereupon we frog-march them over to a particular volume and command them to read it. If they read it and despise it, they’ll never come back. But if they like it, they’re customers for life.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

52. “Moses: God or crowd control?!?”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

53. “I miss the feeling that we understood one another, but I begin to think that was only my delusion all along.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

54. “He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and “fruitfulness” is drawn in.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

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

— Mary Ann Shaffer

56. “I have seized the day, and the night too.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

57. “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.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

58. “I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

59. “As to that Sidney, he sounds a very fine man – but bossy. It’s a failing common in men.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

60. “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.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

61. “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.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

62. “The old adage – humor is the best way to make the unbearable bearable – may be true.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

63. “It would have been better for her not to have such a heart”. Yes, but worse for the rest of us.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

64. “Those times, I tried to think of something happy, something I’d liked – but not something I loved, for that made it worse.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

65. “I told him that if one had to ask which, it generally meant neither.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

66. “The German officers said any soldier caught stealing food from our gardens would be shot. One poor soldier was caught stealing a potato. He was chased by his own people and climbed up a tree to hide. But they found him and shot him down out of the tree. Still, that did not stop them from stealing food. I am not pointing a finger at those practices, because some of us were doing the same. I figure hunger makes you desperate when you wake to it every morning.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

67. “After all, what’s good enough for Austen ought to be good enough for anyone.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

68. “That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive – all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

69. “I myself have never had one, but now I can picture one. I didn’t like Wuthering Heights at first, but the minute that specter, Cathy, scrabbled her bony fingers on the window glass – I was grasped by the throat and not let go. With that Emily I could hear Heathcliff’s pitiful cries upon the moors.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

70. “Grandpa, that’s something I never am.” I asked him, “What’s that?” And he said, “Lonesome in my spirits.” Eli to Eben.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

71. “You can cross out all of the above when Remy is with Kit. At first, she seemed inclined to follow Kit around with her eyes instead of talking to her, but that changed when Kit offered to teach her how to lisp. Remy looked startled, but she agreed to take lessons and they went off to Amelia’s greenhouse together. Her lisp is hampered by her accent, but Kit doesn’t hold that against her and has generously given her extra instructions.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

72. “On the page, I’m perfectly charming, but that’s just a trick I learned. It has nothing to do with me.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

73. “I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them – and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words “the bright day is done and we are for the dark,” I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance – instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

74. “The war is now the story of our lives, and there’s no denying it.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

75. “Not even the Germans could ruin the sea.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

76. “He had no imagination either-fatal for one engaged in child-rearing.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

77. “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.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

78. “It’s a real lightning bolt, this Science of Phrenology. I’ve found out more in the last three days than I knew in my whole life before. Mrs. Guilbert has always been a nasty one, but now I know that she can’t help it – she’s got a big pit in her Benevolence spot. She fell in the quarry when she was a girl, and my guess is she cracked her Benevolence and was never the same since.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

79. “Did any of you ever think that along about thet ime the notion of a soul gave out, Freud popped up with the ego to take its place?”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

80. “I never met a man half so true as a dog.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

81. “We clung to books and to our friends; they reminded us that we had another part to us. Elizabeth used to say a poem. I don’t remember all of it, but it began “Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done, to have advanced true friends?” It isn’t. I hope, wherever she is, she has that in her mind.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

82. “It was so kind of you to write to me about your experiences during the Occupation. At the war’s end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it. I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to something – anything – else. But that is like wishing I were someone else. The war is now the story of our lives, and there’s no subtracting it.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

83. “If there is Predestination, then God is the devil.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

84. “Do you remember the first job your sister and I had in London? In crabby Mr. Hawke’s secondhand bookshop? How I loved him – he’d simply unpack a box of books, hand one or two to us and say, “No cigarette ashes, clean hands – and for God’s sake, Juliet, none of your margin notes! Sophie, dear, don’t let her drink coffee while she reads.” And off we’d go with new books to read.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

85. “My greatest pleasure has been in resuming my evening walks along the cliff tops. The Channel is no longer framed in rolls of barbed wire, the view is unbroken by huge VERBOTEN signs. The mines are gone from our beaches, and I can walk when, where, and for as long as I like. If I stand on the cliffs and turn out to face the sea, I don’t see the ugly cement bunkers behind me, or the land naked without its trees. Not even the Germans could ruin the sea.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

86. “My neighbour Evangeline Smythe is going to have twins in June. She is none too happy about it, so I am going to ask her to give one of them to me.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

87. “Buz, buz, buz, bum, bum, bum, wheeze, wheeze, wheeze, fen, fen, fen, tinky, tinky, tinky, cr’annch! I shall certainly come to be condemned at last. I have been drinking too much for two days running.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

88. “That’s what I told myself – Well, you’re still alive. I think all of us said the same each morning when we woke up – Well, I’m still alive. But the truth is, we weren’t. What we were – it wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t alive either.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

89. “In every nook, I find little things that tell me about her. She was a noticer, Sidney, like me, for all the shelves are lined with shells, bird feathers, dried sea grasses, pebbles, eggshells, and the skeleton of something that might be a bat. They’re just bits that were lying on the ground, that anyone else would step over or on, but she saw they were beautiful and brought them home.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

90. “We’re right together – you make me happy, you never bore me, you’re interested in the things I’m interested in, and I hope I’m not deluded when I say I think the same is true for you. We belong together. I know you loathe it when I tell you I know what’s best for you, but in this case I do.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

91. “Leggere bei libri ti toglie per sempre il piacere di leggere quelli brutti.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

92. “I like stories of passionate encounters. I myself have never had one, but now I can picture one.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

93. “Phrenology: the Science of Interpreting Bumps on the Head.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

94. “I don’t consider myself a real peeper – they go in for bedrooms, but it’s families in sitting rooms or kitchens that thrill me. I can imagine their entire lives from a glimpse of bookshelves, or desks, or lit candles, or bright sofa cushions.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

95. “He’s an expert on Wilkie Collins, of all things. Did you know that Wilkie Collins maintained two separate households with two separate mistresses and two separate sets of children? The scheduling difficulties must have been shocking. No wonder he took laudanum.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

96. “It was amazing to me then, and still is, that so many people who wander into bookshops don’t really know what they’re after – they only want to look round in the hope of seeing a book that will take their fancy.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

97. “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.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer