129 Quotes About Bookstores

  • Author Zadie Smith
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    And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides--no matter what Brent Council may claim--an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: 'Giving the people what they didn't know they wanted.' Important category.

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  • Author Amy Halloran
  • Quote

    But only at Antquarium did I feel a sense of what the library at Alexandria might have been: an accumulation of evidence and suggestions.

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  • Author Michelle Tea
  • Quote

    They were twenty-seven already, in no time at all they’d be thirty, terrifying. No one knew what would happen then. Michelle couldn’t imagine anything more than writing zine-ish memoirs and working in bookstores.

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  • Author Lewis Buzbee
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    My bookstore obsession grew to the point where I'd search for new shops during family trips, as though that were the reason for our travel.

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  • Author Jen Campbell
  • Quote

    Because whether we're in the middle of the desert or in the heart of a city, or the top of a mountain or on an underground train: having good stories to keep us company means the whole world.

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  • Author Laurence Cossé
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    We want splendid books, books that immerse us in the splendor of reality and keep us there; books that prove to us that love is at work in the world next to evil, right up against it, at times indistinctly, and that it always will be, just the way that suffering will always ravage hearts. We want good novels...And even if there is only one such book per decade,...only one...every ten years, that would be enough. We want nothing else.

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  • Author Lauren Leto
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    Bookstores contain the residue of thousands of people who went in there to find an experience, a narrative that guided them to a new place or reinforced what they were doing.

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