Bookstore Quotes

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.

books

Alas!  Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store!

Bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places.

Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way around.

Booksellers, who are a race apart and one and all delightful company, as befits those in whom the ideal and the practical are so nicely blended.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.  A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos to fuel my fantasies.

There is nothing like the smell of a bookstore. If you ask me,  it's actually a combination of smells: part library, part new-book smell, and part expectation for what you might find.

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not foolin' a soul.

Even an ice cream parlor—a definite advantage—does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.

If you're interested in low wages, a bookstore ranks below retail clothing sales, except the hours are worse.

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.

Our bookselling is becoming all too much like selling national brands of cars and breakfast cereals—which is great for cars and cereals, but terrible for books.

The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books.  Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters.

why I write

I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

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

I love bookstores. A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.

A bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order, and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.

The relationship between a bookstore and its patrons is more than commerce, more than business; it's an emotional and spiritual connection.

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

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

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us.  Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.