Bookstore Quotes

“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.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.”
― Tahereh Mafi

“It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”
― Agatha Christie, The Clocks

“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, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“The quality of the content is not determined by the section it sits in in the bookstore.”
― Christine Riccio

“I had to leave my debit card at home when I went into a bookstore or else I would drain my account.”
― Chelsea M. Cameron, My Favorite Mistake

“Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I'd never met and lives I'd never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn't experienced could all be found in those volumes.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.”
― Helene Hanff, Q's Legacy: A Delightful Account of a Lifelong Love Affair with Books

“We all just took the bookstore at its word, because if you couldn't trust a bookstore, what could you trust?”
― Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“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, Dead Bunnies Make All Eight Of Me Cry

“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 Waste Lands

“I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.”
― Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

“I just love the smell of an old book store and the feel of the crisp pages along my fingertips.”
― Leah Spiegel, Foolish Games

“A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.”
― Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

“In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.”
― Rachel Hall

“A place is not really a place without a bookstore.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Nothing belongs to itself anymore.
These trees are yours because you once looked at them.
These streets are yours because you once traversed them.
These coffee shops and bookshops, these cafés and bars, their sole owner is you.
They gave themselves so willingly, surrendering to your perfume.
You sang with the birds and they stopped to listen to you.
You smiled at the sheepish stars and they fell into your hair.
The sun and moon, the sea and mountain, they have all left from heartbreak.
Nothing belongs to itself anymore.
You once spoke to Him, and then God became yours.
He sits with us in darkness now
to plot how to make you ours.” K.K.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“a bookstore is a place densely populated with tens of thousands of authors, dead or living, residing side by side. But books are quiet. They remain dead silent until somebody flips open a page. Only then so they spill out their stories, calmly and thoroughly, just enough at a time for me to handle.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.”
― Nicole Krauss

“It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011”
― Russell Grandinetti

“Bookstores are wondrous places, are they not?”
― Higasa Akai, The Royal Tutor, Vol. 2

“The probability of finding a particular book increases in relation to the clarity of the store's focus, the diligence and shrewdness of the bookseller, and the size of the business.”
― Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance

“Don't die a pauper, don't die a commoner and a weakling.”
― Jaachynma N.E. Agu, The Prince and the Pauper

“They ended up at the Old Corner Bookstore, which Brian had read about in a tour guide to Boston. "Longfellow and Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes used to read here. Let's go in." Brian nudged the girls until they obeyed.

It was a regular bookstore, less history-minded than Brian had expected. In fact, the local history shelves were quite mangeable. I'll buy one book, he thought. This will get me launched in actual reading. Out of the zillions of choices, I'll find one here.

Brian picked out Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. It was thick and somehow exciting, with its chapter headings and scholarly notes and bibliography.”
― Caroline B. Cooney

“Write what you know best. If you can't survive a cross-examination from a lawyer on the subject, you won't survive an interview with a journalist or anchorperson." Linda Radke, President of Five Star Publications.”
― Linda F. Radke

“MAN: Hi, I’ve just self-published my art book. My friends tell me that I’m set to be the new Van Gogh. How many copies of my book would you like to pre-order?
BOOKSELLER: You know, Van Gogh was never appreciated in his lifetime.
MAN: …”
― Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

“(Bookseller puts book that the customer has bought into a paper bag)
CUSTOMER: Don’t you have a plastic bag? I’m sick of all this recycling nonsense. It’s not doing any of us any good.”
― Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

“There once was a town.
It was a quaint little town, in a quiet valley, where life moved at the pace of snails and the only road in was the only way out, too. There was a candy store that sold the sweetest honey taffy you ever tasted, and a garden store that grew exotic, beautiful blooms year-round. The local café was named after a possum that tormented its owner for years, and the chef there made the best honey French toast in the Northeast. There was a bar where the bartender always knew your name, and always served your burgers slightly burnt, though the local hot sauce always disguised the taste. If you wanted to stay the weekend, you could check-in at the new bed-and-breakfast in town--- just as soon as its renovations were finished, and just a pleasant hike up Honeybee Trail was a waterfall there, rumor had it, if you made a wish underneath it, the wish would come true. There was a drugstore, a grocer, a jewelry store that was open only when Mercury was in of retrograde---
And, oh, there was a bookstore.
It was tucked into an unassuming corner of an old brick building fitted with a labyrinthine maze of shelves stocked with hundreds of books. In the back corner was a reading space with a fireplace, and chairs so cozy you could sink into them for hours while you read. The rafters were filled with glass chimes that, when the sunlight came in through the top windows, would send dapples of colors flooding across the stacks of books, painting them in rainbows. A family of starlings roosted in the eaves, and sang different songs every morning, in time with the tolls of the clock tower.
The town was quiet in that cozy, sleepy way that if you closed your eyes, you could almost hear the valley breathe as wind crept through it, between the buildings, and was sighed out again.”
― Ashley Poston, A Novel Love Story

“I paused at the top of the spiral staircase, and soaked in the view.
In the daylight, the bookstore took on a new life.
Motes of dust danced in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. It looked a lot cozier, as the colored glass window ornaments threw rainbows across the bookshelves and pirouetted across the hardwood floors like flecks of dappled sunlight on sand.
Bookcases, filled to the brim, reached up to the ceiling, cluttered with so many colors and kinds of books, short and fat, long and wide, that it almost felt like an assault on the senses. The center of the bookstore was open to the second floor, where tall bookshelves towered so high you had to reach them with ladders. Heavy oak beams supported the roof. Planetariums and glass chimes and other ornaments hung from the rafters, catching the morning's golden light and throwing it across the store. The shelves were made from the same deep oak as the ceiling beams and the banisters on the second floor, signs hanging from the eye-level shelves detailing the different sections of the store: MEMOIR, FANTASY, SCI-FI, ROMANCE, SELF-HELP, NATURE, HOW-TO...
This place was beautiful.
I wondered, briefly, what it would be like to own a place like this. It was magical. A shop that sold the impossible inked onto soft white paper.”
― Ashley Poston, A Novel Love Story