Bookstores Quotes

...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church.

Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd mounded in crooksLibraries beckonAnd bookstores inviteBut book-filled rooms welcomeUs back home at night!

L.R. Knost

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.

Wendy Welch

There is a value to books—unhackable, paper books—that measures far beyond mere ink and paper.

Richard Due

Today is the first day in history.-One of Nathan's Daily GemsFrom the 'Book Store ON Main Street'Seal Beach, CA

Diana Hollingsworth Gessler

I had a friend once who looked at his library and discovered that even if he completely stopped filmmaking (he was a filmmaker too) and just decided to read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was 100 years old. He was a little bit panicked. But he was courageous. He went out of his house. He went to the bookstore. And he bought ten books.

Alain Resnais

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

Jo Walton

I am lost in the world of books. So many books to read.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Books are more to treasure than cars.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It’s not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It’s not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It’s not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it’s the books. I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn’t matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they’re what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend. Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books – for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We’re part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you’re surrounded by this shit – to every side a reminder that we don’t want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you’re buying a fashion accessory, not a book. But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff – history, science, economics – provided they can stick ‘pop.’ in front of it, they’ll stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It’s the new world – we don’t want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they’re on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they’re somewhere between gallery and museum.

Matthew Selwyn

Your reciept is your library card." -- On what killed the brick and mortar bookstores.

michael p naughton

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

Sara Sheridan

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

Gloria Steinem

People open bookstores because they want their souls back.(from "Two Women" published in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House)

Elizabeth Tallent

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

Peter Ackroyd

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody’s in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson’s and Chapters.

Azar Nafisi

They stopped next at a bookstore. "Oh, what a delicious smell of new books!" said Ellen, as they entered. "Mamma, if it wasn't for one thing, I should say I never was so happy in my life.

Susan Bogert Warner

Stop worshiping the bad in boys and start recognizing the good in men

Kerry E. Wagner

A good response beats a bad reaction any day. Be encouraged

Kerry E. Wagner

Intercourse is one thing, Intimacy is everything. Be encouraged

Kerry E. Wagner

One of the smartest things one can do in life sometimes…is play stupid. Be encouraged

Kerry E. Wagner

Just because you start attempting to do right, doesn’t mean people will let you forget about what you’ve done wrong…Be encouraged

Kerry E. Wagner

It wouldn’t matter if he was a bad boy , if you got rid of your bad habit. Be encouraged

Kerry E. Wagner

Books are to the mind as the whetstone for the knives.

Aman Jassal

A bookstore is one of the many pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

Jerry Seinfeld

I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipt, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written or eloquent, they are love letters, everyday letters, secret letters and mundane letters talking about fruit and babies and tennis matches, from people signing themselves as Majorie or Jean....I can't bring myself to dispose of these snippets and snapshots of lives that once meant (or still do mean) so much.

Louise Walters

Judge not the value of a friend by the number of boy- or girlfriends they helped you get. But by the number of books they’ve recommended to you.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A man who looks like Frodo just spent $150 on erotica books and asked for my phone number. I considered giving him yours just to spite you.

Syrie James

Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect.

S.A. Tawks

What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.

Sarah Jio

Lover of books, lover of knowledge.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Until a man begins to read, then He will discover himself.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I am happy to have all the books I need to read.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I wish to continue reading.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The pleasure of reading is the greatest solitude.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.

Mark Helprin

The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.

C.S. Lewis

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

Ernest Hemingway

I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.

Heather Demetrios

Second hand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They'd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned."Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had child-like scrawls on the acknowledgement page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loathe were they to damage their treasure.I loved them all.And I found it hard to part with them. Though years of book selling had steeled me. I had to let them go, and each time made a fervent wish they'd be read well, and often.Missy, my best friend, said I was completely cuckoo, and that I spent too much time alone in my shadowy shop, because I believed my books communicated with me. A soft sigh here, as they stretched their bindings when dawn broke, or a hum, as they anticipated a customer hovering close who might run a hand along their cover, tempting them to flutter their pages hello. Books were fussy when it came to their owners, and gave off a type of sound, an almost imperceptible whirr, when the right person was near. Most people weren't aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them.

Rebecca Raisin

Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.

Louis L'Amour

The replacement of independent bookstores by firms such as Barnes & Noble, Waterstones or Borders superficially provided a wide range of reading, but their policies further limited choice.

Sara Ayad

There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something.

A. Edward Newton

I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.

Jerry Pinto

Books are more precious than jewels. She truly believed this. What did a diamond bring you? A momentary flash of brilliance. A diamond scintillated for second a book could scintillate forever.

Veronica Henry

If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.

Jen Campbell

Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.

Adelise M. Cullens

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

Roger Ebert

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.

Paul Acampora

Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.

Stephen King

The Bookshop has a thousand books,All colors, hues, and tinges,And every cover is a doorThat turns on magic hinges.

Nancy Byrd Turner

For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.

Lewis Buzbee

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.

Mary Ann Shaffer

those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...

Anna Quindlen

His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

George Carlin

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Bookstores Quotes

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