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.
Opportunity may knock only once but temptation leans on the door bell
To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight--and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth.
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.
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.
His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.
those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...
I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadnβt known I wanted.
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.
The Bookshop has a thousand books, All colors, hues, and tinges, And every cover is a door That turns on magic hinges.
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.
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.
Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.
Reality doesnβt always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.
Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.
If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.
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.
We are much more likely to be drawn to a messy bookstore than a neat one because the mess signifies vitality. We are not drawn to a bookstore because of tasteful, Finnish shelves in gunmetal gray mesh, each one displaying three carefully chosen, color-coordinated covers. Clutter -- orderly clutter, if possible -- is what we expect. Like a city. It's not quite a city unless there's more than enough.
Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.
The books in her shop werenβt merely things. They were gifts wrapped in imagination, inspiration, excite ment, pain, and heartache. Gifts given by thousands of writers. Gifts just waiting to be opened.
