Want some updates on Nowhere Bookshop?
So, Nowhere Bookshop remains in that strange liminal space where our doors aren’t open to customers because the plague won’t go away and we don’t want to contribute to that, but we’ve had a lot of local San Antonians ask if they could pick up books from the store so this week we’re going to try out no-contact curbside service. Like, you order and pay online and then call us when you’re at the store and we make sure no one is around and then run your books to a table outside the shop and then when we’re safely back inside you can run up in your mask and grab your books off the table and speed away like you’re doing some sort of wonderful book heist. It’s basically the most introverted sales experience ever and I sort of think we should keep that option forever. Click here for details if you’re local. And we still ship everywhere if you’re like me and don’t ever want to leave the house again.
This weekend Victor and Hailey and I went to the shop and worked while it was empty and I can’t even tell you how many amazing books are there. And tarot cards and stuffed animals and socks and automatons and art and cards and bags and socks and OMG, Y’ALL. I want to do a live feed soon walking through the store with you because it is kind of magic already even though it’s still not really finished.
Poor Elizabeth is feeling Victor’s pain as I sneak bizarre stuff into the store and do ridiculous things that make her probably question ever agreeing to work with me. Like this series of messages I just sent her:
She didn’t quit though and was totally okay with the art because she is good people and also because there is no sense in arguing with me. (Also, the mouse is reading “Of Mice and Men” because of course she is.)
One other thing that I want to do with the store is have little quotes written around on the walls and behind books and in places you might not expect. They’ll be small and semi-hidden…like finding little messages from ghosts…and I’d like them to be either quotes from books or about books. Some will be written on tiny squares of paper and slipped into books. Some will be written under shelves so only tiny children see them. Many will never be found but I sort of like that. Here are a few of my favorite quotes about reading but I need a lot more so will you share yours? Any wonderful quote from or about a book that stuck with you that you want to share with the world.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
― Oscar Wilde
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges
Suggestions?
“Not all who wander are lost” Tolkien
Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can get – Charlaine Harris 🙂
“…the world will never find peace until men fall at their women’s feel and ask for forgiveness.”
So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa
I should clarify…i know “book” isn’t in it, but books are some of the best journeys for me, so it’s the first one that popped into my head. 🙂
Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes: “I don’t know what it means and I don’t care because it’s Shakespeare and it’s like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words.”
suggested snippet: “… it’s Shakespeare and it’s like having jewels in my mouth …”
“Without the dark there isn’t light. Without the pain there is no relief. And I remind myself that I’m lucky to be able to feel such great sorrow, and also such great happiness. I can grab on to each moment of joy and live in those moments because I have seen the bright contrast from dark to light and back again.“ – Jenny Lawson
It might not be appropriate, but it’s helped me many, many times, “It’s probably going to hurt.” Stephen King, The Gingerbread Girl
“Yes, we too are stardust.” – Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World
“And this I have learned: grown-ups do not know the language of shadows.”
Opal Whiteley
I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. (Lyndsay Faye)
I have this one framed on my bookshelf:
You will never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me – C.S. Lewis
“You’re just as sane as I am” – Luna Lovegood (not an author lol but still a good quote 🤷🏼♀️)
ACK! Beating a dragon? That doesn’t sound very nice! Dragons are friendly and shouldn’t be abused! 🙁 Here’s my contribution for a quote… a favorite from Alice in Wonderland, of course:
“Well now that we *have* seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”
How wonderful!! antelope Boleyn! and the mouse decal……….you are brilliant!!
These friends in books are friends for life. – Munro Leaf
I found a wonderful tribe of friends through Twilight years ago and we still quote “Be safe.” as a shorthand for our care and concern of each other. And Edward, of course.
What a great idea, Jenny! This is one of my favorites:
So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
“…the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.” Jack Kerouac
Quote about books: Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. Groucho Marx
Quote not about books, but it’s from Mark Twain: Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
The second quote is truer than ever right now, wouldn’t you agree?
Nowhere Books is on my bucket list!
Just a few from the best book out there:
Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
“Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
“Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
“Having a physical reaction to a lack of book is not unusual.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
“Reading a book four times in one day is perfectly normal behavior.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
“If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”
― John Waters
Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
Harry Potter has some great wisdom!
“Words come to mean what most people think they mean, not what we say they ought to mean.” –William Safire
My local bookstore is doing shopping by appointment. You reserve a 45 minute time slot and buy a gift card to the store to reserve your spot. When you arrive at your appointed time (mask required) you’re greeted by a bookseller who offers you hand sanitizer. In the 15 minutes between appointments, counters and spaces that you touched are disinfected. Being alone in a bookstore for 45 minutes was like a childhood dream come true!
She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain. Louisa May Alcott
I never have much to say unless I’m in a library or a bookstore; and then I say too much. I never seem to get the talking thing right.
~~from Where We Belong by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Just a few from the best book ever:
If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
The libraries in Ireland have “reopened”. You can’t go in, but you can email your local branch and have a chat about the types of books you like to read. The lovely staff pick a selection for you and you pop in at a designated time to collect them.
My mum is a huge fan and was delighted with her first selection.
“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.” –Giilbert Highet
“If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.” Jennifer Crusie
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” – Carl Sagan
I have 2 that I would love to get as tattoos if it weren’t for the whole not liking needles/pain and probably being allergic to the ink thing. One is “Don’t Panic” from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the other is actually from you – “Weird on you bad ass motherfucker”. But you probably can’t use that one in the store. 😉
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
-Groucho Marx
From a play, not a book. “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.” Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika
“i just did a lot of cocaine” -jenny lawson
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
– Dr. Seuss
“Books are uniquely portable magic” ~ Stephen King
She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain. Louisa May Alcott
“So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.” Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
I think adding quotes from book themselves would be truly wonderful. Especially any that talk about the joy of books themselves.
There are several quotes from the book Tilly & the Bookwanderers that are truly wonderful. I read it at the beginning of lockdown, because I just couldn’t read anything else.
“she felt like a seasoned traveler within the pages of books”
“she compared herself to the characters she met in books their ink and paper felt more real than her bones and skin.”
“The books we love when we’re growing up shape us in a special way, Tilly. The characters in the books we read help us decide who we want to be.”
“Books can change minds and change worlds, open doors and open minds, and plant seeds that can grow into magical or even terrifying things. Stories are things to be loved and respected at the same time; never underestimate the power of them.”
“Our stories are how we will be remembered—so we’ve got to make sure they are worth telling.”
Truly a fun series for anyone, at any age, to read. Happy hiding thoughtful words for your readers Jenny!! Your words have greatly kept me entertained on a long cross country road trip!
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading.” -Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I can see no way out but through. Robert frost
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King
Basically, books are magick and have souls.
“I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head…”
― Laurie R. King
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us- Paul Theroux. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I ended up where I needed to be- Douglas Adams
“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”–Jhumpa Lahiri
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” – Lemony Snicket
“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney
“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” – Paul Sweeney
“The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t.” – Mark Twain
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx
For Reading Month at school, I covered my door with quotes about books and reading. These were some of them. I wish I’d taken a picture….
“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“Every single one wants to matter. We want our lives, and our stories and the choices we made or didn’t make to matter.”
― Anthony Ray Hinton,
A book is like a garden carried in your pocket. —- Chinese proverb
If a book is well written I always find it too short. —-Jane Austen
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.—-Descartes
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies…The man who never reads lives only one. —-George R. R. Martin
“But of all the magic I’ve known, I’ve had to make myself” Shel Silverstein
Of course I’m blanking on a good quote right now but I am truly loving everyone else’s wonderful quotes. Also, it seems like early on you said something about not really loving that flooring but it was too expensive to change, but I have to tell you I love the flooring. It seems warm and earthy and cozy.
“AC said, ‘THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.'” — Isaac Asimov, The Last Question
“I do not read to think. I do not read to learn.
I do not read to search for truth
I know the truth, the truth is hardly what I need.
I read to dream.” – Passion
“God favors drunks, small children, and the cataclysmically stoned…” Stephen King, IT
I have two:
“Books! The best weapons in the world!” – Tenth Doctor
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Cicero
“AC said, ‘THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.'” — Isaac Asimov, The Last Question
“Dear Victor: You make me sick.”
“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.“ – Walt Disney
Stephen King, from his book _On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft_: “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
I got bookplates made for my bestie that say “Portable Magic from Library”. I still feel like a genius!
From Callaghan’s Crosstime Saloon by spider Robinson: A problem shared is lessened; a joy shared is increased.
“We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.” ~Peter Beagle
“It always breaks my heart a little, when I come to the end of a book.” –Zane Hickman
Oh! Oh! One more:
“Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.”
– Laini Taylor from Muse of Nightmares (one of my fav authors besides you!)
“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
A good quote for the cookbooks section: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“Go then, there are other worlds than these.” -Stephen King
I would have spent the next three hours searching for something to post, then I realized my favorite book quote is LITERALLY TATTOOED on my arm. SMH.
I don’t have the exact quote but it was Stephen King describing how he writes, like falling into the typewriter.
A couple from one of my favorite books, The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
“Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”
Jenny, I am learning German and one of the phrases early on in the program was “Die Mäuse lesen ein Buch” and I thought how silly it was to learn that the kids are reading a book but now I’m really glad I learned it!
“Don’t marry someone who doesn’t read books. You won’t have anything to talk about after a year.” Said by my grandmother when I was eight. I took her advice and we are still happy after 25 years.
“There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
For the bar… “A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world” – Louis Pasteur
“God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.” – Rebecca West
“Never disregard a book because the author of it is a ridiculous fellow.” – Lord Melbourne (William Lamb)
“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.” – Jane Austen
“It’s never too cold, too wet, or too hot
To pick up a book, and share what you’ve got
You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild
To pick up a book, and read to a child.” – Anita Merina
“No one ever asks about the language” – Amy Tan (as quoted by Stephen King)
“There is no one right way to live” -Daniel Quinn
reality is for people that lack imagination – Hayao Miyazaki
“We are all stardust and stories” Erin Morgenstern – The Starless Sea
“The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.” – Harry Dresden
“The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.”
[from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]
Lois Lowry
From Doctor Who:
Books. People never really stop loving books. Fifty-first century. By now you’ve got holovids, direct-to-brain downloads, fiction mist. But you need the smell. The smell of books.”
AND
“You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!”
Curbside pickup is great, our little local bookshop has been doing it during the plague, also delivery via bicycle courier (Bard’s Alley in Vienna, VA). Wish I lived closer, would do the curbside pickup on the regular.
OK, that didn’t work, so I’ll try again under my old screen name:
“There is no one right way to live” -Daniel Quinn
I have two:
“Thank you for being my light in the darkness” – Scorpius Malfoy (HP & the Cursed Child)
“Belief and faith are great, but very few people have been led astray by thinking for themselves” – Leah Remini (Troublemaker)
Your plague-burdened book shop sounds like absolute heaven. I can’t wait until the plague is over and it can be revealed!! Love that you’ve moved to the curbside pick-up because… life has to go on and… oh I just cannot wait to visit!
Gak. FAVORITE quote in a book… ever? I guess it’s because it’s my mom’s death anniversary and I’m feeling eternal and also as if I’m disappearing but:
“I am glad, he said, ‘that I’m not the only one. Can we just go somewhere and drink something and forget?” -Gus from Don’t Ask Me Why by Tania Kindersley… inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s characters.
But that’s maybe a bit depressing for a ghost to whisper it onto the wall…
In any case, self promotion! Please check out my Mozilla (fuck Google) latest post: Wasps Are Mean and “Argh” as it is darkly-humored and ends with pirates:
https://epileptaste.wordpress.com/2020/06/23/wasps-are-mean-and-argh/?theme_preview=true&iframe=true&frame-nonce=a85c06c5d1
“Because you are defined not by life’s imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. And because there is joy in embracing – rather than running from – the utter absurdity of life.” Jenny Lawson
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
“You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!”
— The Doctor, Season 2, Episode 2
“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” – Paul Sweeney
“Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!”- The Doctor
Do you know “Uncle Wiggily’s Story Book” by Howard R Garis?
The quotes at the end of each chapter are so whimsical and joyful I think they would be a perfect addition to your collection
A few examples:
“Anyhow, if it should happen that the doorknob doesn’t turn around and try and crawl through the keyhole when the milk bottle chases the pussy cat off the back stoop, then I may tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the chicken-pox”
or
“And if the hand-organ monkey doesn’t take the squeak out of the rubber ball to make a tin horn for the rag doll, the next story will be about Uncle Wiggiy and the horse”
Love them all…
Not a reading quote but a writing one, from John Prine (sob!):
“Writing is about a blank piece of paper and leaving out what’s not supposed to be there”
“Despair made the deserts and hope shaped the oasis.”
Anne Bishop
It is the writer’s obligation to his craft to go to bed angry, and to rise up angrier the next day. To fight for the words because, at final moments, that’s all a writer has to prove his right to exist as a spokesman for his times. To retain the sense of smell; to know what one smells is the corruption of truth and not the perfumes of Araby.
Harlan Ellison
Congratulations on your store!
“My life is a reading list.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives. – Lemony Snicket
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
“All knowledge is worth having.” – Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Dart
“Life is short and pain is long and we were all put on this earth to help each other.”
― Stephen King, Firestarter
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Go then. There are other worlds than this- Stephen King, The Gunslinger
“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin
“THERE’S NO BETTER PRESENT THAN A FUTURE.”
– Anthropomorphic Personification of Death, Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough; books should be written with soundtracks, like films – Terry Pratchett “Diggers”
“A good bookshop is just a genteel black hole that knows how to read.” — Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
Tough titty, as the kitty was reputed to have said to the babes who complained about the warmth of the milk.
– Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
Oh. I see. People don’t want to see what can’t possibly exist.
Terry Pratchett, Mort
And
Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.
A.A. Milne
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” -Kurt Vonnegut
You deserve every star in the galaxy laid out at your feet and a thousand diamonds in your hair. You deserve someone who’ll run with you as far and as fast as you want to. Holding your hand, not holding you back.
Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, Illuminae Files #1
“Speak the names…We die once when the last breath leaves our bodies. We die a second time when the last person speaks our name.” Lisa Wingate, The Book of Lost Friends
“the Unseen University Library was a magical library, built on a very thin patch of space-time. There were books on distant shelves that hadn’t been written yet, books that never would be written. At least, not here” – Terry Pratchett “The Last Continent”
“I was seven before I realized that you could eat breakfast with your pants on.”
-Christopher Moore (Fool)
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” – Mark Twain
“When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.” – The Prince and the Pauper
“Irreverence is the champion of liberty.” – Mark Twain
“Life does not consist mainly–or even largely–of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.” – Mark Twain (Autobiography)
All knowledge is worth having. – Jacqueline Carey
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” – Albert Einstein
“You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax, all you need is a book.”-Dr. Seuss
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though. – Holden Caulfield “Catcher in the Rye”
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time” – Andre Gide
“There are years that ask questions, and years that answer” – Zora Neale Hurston
“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you fucking like something, like it.” – Dave Grohl
“Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable.” – Twyla Tharp
“Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind” – Maria Popova
“Instructions for living a life. Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell About It.” – Mary Oliver
“I have no special talent. I am passionately curious” – Albert Einstein
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men. (Good Omens)
“Stay gold, Ponyboy” – Susan Hinton
(I don’t usually remember quotes, but that one has stayed with since I was a teen, and I think it would go well in the YA-section)
I grew up watching Louis Meyer’s book reviews on ch 6 in Tulsa. He’d end each spot with: “Remember, the more books you read, the taller you grow,”
https://www.newson6.com/story/5e35b77afcd8ef694720b533/news-on-6-celebrates-the-legacy-of-lewis-meyer
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you” maya Angelou, I know why the caged bird sings.
“As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was going to happen.” -A.A. Milne
“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“He spent his life immersed in books to the cost of everything else, even personal relationships. “Friends,” he’d once said, “are probably great, but I have forty thousands friends of my own already, and each of them needs my attention.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Woman Who Died a Lot
I don’t know if anyone’s done this one yet, but I got this on a magnet at the New York Public Library, and it’s one of my favorites.
“A book is a dream you hold in your hand.” – Neil Gaiman
“Be assured that any hurt to your spirit will pass in time. It is the nature of Death to take, but the nature of Life to give.”
― Garth Nix, Lirael
Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. – Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Not about books or reading, but about taste…
“Each one sees what he carries in his heart.” – Goethe
“Nothing is so good that someone somewhere won’t hate it” – Pohl’s Law
“Books are your friends. You wouldn’t write on your friends, would you?” — my mom
Okay, I know it’s not a quote from anyone famous, but I still feel guilty writing in books!
“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.” Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” Annie Dillard, The Living
This one feels 100% like you Jenny
“Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky second-hand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really are, having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it.” -Terry Pratchett “Guards Guards”
Or..
“a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” – Terry Pratchett “Guards Guards”
First Law: Books Are For Use.
Second Law: Every Reader His/Her Book.
Third Law: Every Book Its Reader.
Fourth Law: Save The Time Of The Reader.
Fifth Law: The Library Is A Growing Organism.
Five Laws of Library Science, S.R. Ranganathan
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. — Anna Quindlan
“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.” – Good Omens
You should do some bookmarks with some of the quotes!
I’ve got two from The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern:
A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.
“We are the stars,” he answers, as though it is the most obvious of facts afloat in a sea of metaphors and misdirections. “We are all stardust and stories.”
I’ve got two from Jackaby by William Ritter:
“I have ceased concerning myself with how things look to others,” I said. “As someone told me recently, others are generally wrong.”
“I don’t want to wait at the doorstep any longer. I want to go dashing off after giants and pixies and dragons. I want to meet with mysterious strangers at crossroads and turn widdershins in the moonlight. I want to listen to the fish, Jackaby.”
That painting is the best
“Even the darkest night will end & the sun will rise,” Les Miserables
“A room without books is like a body without a soul,” Cicero
“If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.” – Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book.
“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda
“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.” -Luna Lovegood
Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix
I ordered business cards that say “You are beautiful “. I leave them in random places, bookstores, magazine shops, makeup counters, tucked in socks in stores….
Also this one:
You really ought to read more books – you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~ Cicero
I’ve always loved that quote. It’s how I decorate.
“You’re nobody’s rainbow. You’re nobody’s princess. You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.” –Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway
“Lean back on your knife and let your tongue go free” – Robert Jordan
“I, myself, am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.” – Augustin Burroughs, Magical Thinking
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
“Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!” -10th Doctor, Doctor Who
“Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a… it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It’s-it’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible. It should be, um, smelly.” -Rupert Giles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
From Inkheart by Cordelia Funke (you may need to look it up to confirm wording as I am doing from memory): “Do you know why books are so heavy? Because they contain an entire world inside of them.” I use this all the time but I’m probably getting the exact wording wrong.
Love the art!
“There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.”
— Derrick Jensen, A Language Older than Words
“… she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.” -The Last Unicorn
The very last line of The Wild Party, which is a novella-length poem by Joseph Moncure March: The door sprang open / And the cops rushed in.
“It matters not what someone is born, it’s what they grow up to be.” — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“The cure for Boredom is Curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Dorothy Parker
“He always looked his best when circumstances called for him to be a boy and a man at the same time.” – Amor Towles, Rules of Civility
“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.” —Neil Gaiman, Dream Country (The Sandman, #3)
“ Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.” —Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
“All stories are true,” Skarpi said. “But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.” He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. “More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.” —Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.” —Neil Gaiman, A Game of You (The Sandman, #5)
“Remember your name. Do not lose hope–what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.” —Neil Gaiman, Instructions
“Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness or to a career in politics.” Master Li “Bridge if Birds” by Barry Hughart.
“We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.” – Tracy Chevalier
“Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.” -Muriel Barbery
“Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.” -Muriel Barbery
“For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?” -Muriel Barbery
Jenny, I don’t have an inspiring quote to leave (9 times out of 10 I am quoting movies and TV shows!), but wanted to mention that once it was safe to do so our local small bookstores and comic book stores (and other local businesses) started doing online orders with contactless pickup while they were closed, and have continued to do so now that some of them have opened since some restrictions have been loosened here in my lovely corner of BC Canada 🇨🇦. Some even worked with the local delivery companies to get things to those who are unable to get out safely.
Take care of yourselves, your employees, your delivery companies, and your customers! We’ve got a long way to go, but by being calm, careful, courteous, and smart, we will get through this!❤
“He always looked his best when circumstances called for him to be a boy and a man at the same time.” – Amor Towles, Rules of Civility
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. Desiderius Erasmus, born 1466 or 1469.
You could also put up some famous first lines, especially about dreaming, like “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again”
Not about books, but my favorite book quote is from John Green’s Looking for Alaska… “ext to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” -Flannery O’Connor
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King
“Books are mirrors. You only see in them what you already have inside you.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafron
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once.” – George R. R. Martin
“I was read to as a small child; I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again – if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.” Marilynne Robinson
There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more. – The Smithd
“I am on a curiosity voyage, and I need my paddles to travel. These books… these books are my paddles.” -Dustin Henderson
“It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.”
— Paul Gallico
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx
You must feel that the characters are deep. And I don’t mean deep in the sense that they have a lot of deep thoughts. They must have thickness. Do they stand off the page? Then the writer puts them into a position where they can’t get out. You don’t get scared of monsters; you get scared for people.
From Conversations on Terror with Stephen King
A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
“…the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.” – Seanan McGuide, Every Heart a Doorway
Is this a kissing book? – The Princess Bride
I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read. – George R.R. Martin
Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you and the the things they claim are junk. You’ll find what you need to find. Just read – Neil Gaiman
The cure for boredom is books. There is no cure for books – Unknown
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not half so bad as ignorance. Granny Weatherwax (Terry Pratchett)
A book is a dream you hold in your hand – Neil Gaiman
Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage – CS Lewis
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. – Mason Cooley
Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy – Charlaine Harris
So many wonderful possibilities, but I agree with #119 — gotta have some Maya Angelou in the bookshop!
Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.” Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 hour bookstore
As someone who also struggles with anxiety, there is one quote that stands out for me as it literally gets me through every day:
“Don’t Panic”
From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
It’s not about books, but it is from a book! And I love the idea of someone moving a book and encountering that as a hidden quote somewhere (written iin large, friendly letters, naturally).
Keep up amazing work! One day when international borders are open again I would love to find myself in this shop!!
“There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night
For your cards/stationery section, a quote by John Donne ” More than kisses, letters mingle souls, for thus, friends absent speak.”
“People think that stories are shaped by people; in fact, it’s the other way around.” – Terry Pratchett
“You are only as happy as your least happy child” – Annie Kilcannon in the Dogfather series books (written by Roxanne St. Claire)
The Oompa Loompas sing about reading books during the Mike TV send off song.
Oompa Loompa doompadee doo
I’ve got another puzzle for you
Oompa Loompa doompadah dee
If you are wise you’ll listen to me
What do you get from a glut of TV?
A pain in the neck and an IQ of three
Why don’t you try simply reading a book?
Or could you just not bear to look?
You’ll get no
You’ll get no
You’ll get no
You’ll get no
You’ll get no commercials
Oompa Loompa Doompadee Dah
If you’re not greedy you will go far
You will live in happiness too
Like the Oompa
Oompa Loompa doompadee do
“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.” — John Cheever
“There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.” — Montesquieu
Both of these are drawn from an old poster from the Tattered Cover in Denver.
That Neil quote is one of my favorites, but I also love this one: “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.” from “Fables and Reflections.”
While I’m VERY off of Anne Rice, I still think this is one of the most beautiful moments I’ve read and it still sticks with me. “For several long moments we remained locked together, and I think I covered her hair with small sacred kisses, her perfume crucifying me with memories.” from “Merrick”
From George R. R. Martin: “We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth.”
“Fries!” Jenks exclaimed, and Jax sneezed from the lamp hanging over the table. Pixy dust sifted down along with the mundane type. “Tink-knocks-your-knickers, I want fries too.” – Kim Harrison “A Fistful of Charms”
“Anything is possible. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein
What do stars do? They shine.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust
“A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?” Pointless, really…”Do the stars gaze back?” Now, that’s a question.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust
“I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.” – Dorothy Parker
“There are four things that lead to wisdom. You ready for them?’
She nodded, wondering when the police work would begin.
“They are four sentences we learn to say, and mean.” Gamache held up his hand as a fist and raised a finger with each point. “I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong’.”
― Louise Penny, Still Life
I love this idea! Here’s my contribution:
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.”
C.S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,”
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
From “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (my favorite book in the world).
“The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.” – Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
We have art in order not to die from the truth. Nietzsche
“When I was your age, television was called books.” – The Princess Bride (film)
“It’s never too late to have a happy Childhood” – Tom Robbins (from Still Life With Woodpecker)
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” —Groucho Marx
“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes,” – Erasmus
“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” – Carl Sagan
Jenny, this isn’t a quote, but after seeing your mouse picture, you really have to check out the street artist David Zinn, who draws in chalk (yes, rain will destroy it) on various surfaces and objects and is SPECTACULAR if you want to experience, quite simply, a moment of delight. He is a self-described “weirdo,” which means he really needs to be mentioned on this website. Look him up next time you feel poorly.
I don’t know what dust is, what is it, that fine gray powdery stuff? It’s not something you ever see anywhere else. I mean, it’s not crumbs of hairs or fluff, it’s not lint off your clothes or fur off animals, it’s not ash or iron filings or wood shavings. It’s dust and it’s made of nothing and comes from nowhere to cover everything.
The Brimstone Wedding
Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)
Not about books but still,
“And thought she be but little, she is fierce.” – William Shakespeare
There’s one I always go back to in the dark and it feels like it would very much enjoy living at Nowhere:
“Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased—thus do we refute entropy.” aka Callihan’s Law
~Spider Robinson, Callihan’s Crosstime Saloon
And then there’s the just for fun:
“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
And just generally inspiring
“Limiting the freedom of news ‘just a little bit’ is in the same category with the classic example ‘a little bit pregnant.”
or
“I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
― Paulo Coelho
“Oh I love your magazine. My favorite section is ‘How To Increase Your Word Power’. That thing is really, really, really…good.” Homer Simpson
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
I have two, both from Tamora Pierce (an amazing author)
“It’s not just children who need heroes”. Which I know isn’t technically about books, but it definitely reminds me of reading, and
“Books are still the main yardstick by which I measure true wealth.”
“Second star to the right and straight on till morning.” J.M. Barre
“…a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much…” Tyrion Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” Jojen Reed in A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin
“Child! do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.” – Hilaire Belloc
If I come up with some more I will post them later. I love that you’re thinking of doing this. What a great idea.
“Reader, I married him.” — Jane Eyre
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
Madeleine L’Engle
“Language is play to most writers, thoughts are play.” – Stephen King, Danse Macabre
“Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.” – Clive Barker, Weaveworld
“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” – C.S. Lewis
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” Annie Dillard (The Living)
I have too many to choose from, but here is one of my favorites….because I can’t wait to disappear into Nowhere!
“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” ― Terry Pratchett
It’s not about books, but words: “What I ask for is an amnesty for bad words…” it’s from Roberto Fontanarrosa, he was a cartoonist and writer with the most amazing sense of humor and the kindest heart.
“A fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself.” -Jane Austen
“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Live of books is the best of all.” -Jacqueline Kennedy
Also, that poor mouse may be in for quite a shock at the end of that book. Just sayin’. Though perhaps she, like many of us, need the dark in our tales as much as we need the light.
You really can’t go wrong looking to Terry Pratchett for quotes on reading and books.
“The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
“In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She’d much prefer to read a good book.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
“Yes! I’m me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don’t understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That’s the kind of person I am!”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
“I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”
― Terry Pratchett
“And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction
“The Library didn’t only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren’t also dangerous, just because reading them didn’t make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader’s brain.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
“She’d read the dictionary all the way through. No one told her you weren’t supposed to.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
“Everywhere I have looked for peace, and never found it except in a corner with a book.” — Thomas a Kempis.
Forever is composed of nows -Emily Dickinson
This might not be suitable for the children’s section. From Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals: “All her clothes might fall off. I am sorry about this, but it appears to be a by-product of the whole business of poetry.”
It’s probably too “dark”, but… “Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.“ My main man, Terry Pratchett! 😄
“There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” -Joan Didion, The White Album
OF COURSE you need “We’re all mad here” -Lewis Carroll. I’ve also always really liked “…it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” (Also Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” – Kahlil Gibran
“I am lost in my own mind” wheel of time, Robert Jordan
“Perhaps – I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.” Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
Richer than I you can never be-I had a mother who read to me.
She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain. — Louisa May Alcott
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons. — Robertson Davies
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them. — Ursula K. Me Guin
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes
— Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior
Both from one of my most favorite books of all time:
“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.” –The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield
“Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.” –The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield
“Clarice Starling always looked her age and always made that age look good.” -Thomas Harris, giving us words to live by
“If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!” – John Waters
(perhaps not in the children’s section, or where they might stumble upon it)
I need to know where you got your reading mouse decal !!! Please share !
“Travel far, pay no fare, a book can take you anywhere.” Anne Morrow Lindbergh from the book Travel Far Pay No Fare
So many quotes….so hard to pick just one. Here’s my favorite though…..
“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain
https://www.mrs-completely.com/funnywoman/til-death-us-do-part/
Every year I read THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX to my second graders, and every year I find hope and joy in its pages. Here are a couple quotes from it:
“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning…Make some light.”
“Once upon a time,” he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.”
To be so lovely and so lost. To be all answerful with all that knowing trapped inside. To be beautiful and broken” – Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things
I even have a a tattoo of “To be beautiful and broken” I love it so much
Seeing Someone Reading A Book You Love Is Seeing A Book Recommend a Person. (i could not find who said it)
A few from P.G. Wodehouse:
“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”
“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”
“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
― P.G. Wodehouse , The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology
“I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”
― P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest
I know this is a LOT of quote, but it is one of my most favorite ever that’s not from Charles de Lint.. this is Terry Pratchett’s, from Small Gods. It’s how he starts the book.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap . . .
And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.
And then the eagle lets go.
And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.
One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.
Hi Jenny – Love this idea! What great quotes! Mine has always been Robert Frost’s…”Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
“Yer a wizard, Harry.” – Hagrid
Of course, I’d quote not from a book, but the 10th Doctor’s talking about books from “Tooth and Claw”:
“You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!”
I am a lover of quotes, so I absolutely ADORE this idea! The ones I have on books have already been mentioned, but here’s one I have on writing: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anais Nin
“As for you and your heart, she will remember them when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.” – The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
I named our book club after this quote from Mark Twain:
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience – this is the ideal life”
It drives my fellow members crazy because it is kinda long for a name, and kinda hard to remember.
“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman
“I solemnly swear I am up to no good
“Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
“Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact, so far as professional advancement goes.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
“You can’t just accidentally penis somebody.”
― Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art
Frank, in common with all men he knew, felt that a wife should be guided by her husband’s superior knowledge, should accept his opinion in full and have none of her own. He would have given most women their own way. Women were such funny creatures, and it never hurt to humor their small whims. He would have enjoyed gratifying the foolish notions of some soft little person and scolding her lovingly for her stupidity and extravagance. –Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
“Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” – PJ O’Rourke
“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
– Douglas Adams, from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987)
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
– Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
“Each time you open a book and read it, a tree smiles knowing there’s life after death.”
If you’re Nowhere, you’re Here.
“When the day shall come that we do part, if my last words are not ‘I love you’ — ye’ll ken it was because I didna have time.” –Diana Gabaldon, The Fiery Cross
One more from Douglas (he has TONS):
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
“My experience of life is that it is not divided into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky. ”
– Alan Moore
Anna Quindlen:
“Books are the plane; and the train, and the road. They are the destination and the journey. They are home.”
“Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.”
Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.
– J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.” ― Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas
“It’s about finding your own twisted perfection, letting yourself fall too far and taking a chance. If you’ve done all that. You have no reason to give up. Not now.” ― Abbi Glines, Because of Lila
Cool, I’ll think about quotes, BUT: What’s that book Hailey’s holding please?
There are so many great quotes above! I’ve got two that are my favorite and have plans to have them as tattoos:
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one. ~George R.R. Martin
A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera
“A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
“Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery – The Little Prince
I really don’t like the book but the quote always sticks with me.
“Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
– Groucho Marx
“‘ What is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?'” — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
– C.S. Lewis
“Books are the liberated spirits of men” –Mark Twain
I think that picture should go in the “How To..” section
“May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books”
Thomas Carlyle
“Real isn’t how you are made,it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” –as said by the Skin Horse in the Velveteen Rabbit, and understood by any one who loved a stuffed animal beyond words at some point in their lives.
“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
– Donna Tartt, The Secret History
not about books per se, but one of my favorites: “Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” – Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
“Give him a book and he will read all day.” Jane Austen
I’m sure I would do curbside pick up forever if it were offered. But I would love to see all around your lovely Nowhere Book shop!
Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one – Terry Pratchett
“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” – Joyce Carol Oates
“I could spend the rest of my life
READING,
Just satisfying my
CURIOSITY
– because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about.” – Malcolm X
“We read to know we’re not alone.” – William Nicholson
“A book is like a garden, carried in the pocket” -Chinese Proverb
“I love books. I like that the moment you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world, into a story that’s way more interesting that yours will ever be.” – Elizabeth Scott
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” – Carl Sagan
I collected these to decorate my classroom– I’m an English teacher 😀
“Stories, my father used to say, would always change the course of our lives, the greatest ones being retold over and over again not to simply convey morals or life lessons, but to bring people together.” – Tanaz Bhathena
“Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.” – Mary Oliver
“First, because what is written is what is true. Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy. Even my own writings—so damnably powerless—may have just enough power to reach the right person and to tell the right truth, and change the nature of things.” – Alix E. Harrow
“All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unalike.” – Maya Angelou
Jane Austen-“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
Also Jane Austen–“if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
Not about a book but still love it.
Nietzsche: One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
“The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
I have two book-quote tattoos, so I’m gonna share those.
“The world is quiet here” – Lemony Snicket, Series of Unfortunate Events
“Breathe the way a jellyfish moves” – Kristin Cashore, Jane Unlimited
It’s fun recommending those books to folks at work, and going “Yeah, you can tell I really like that one!”, or alternately, recommending the book when they notice the tattoo and comment on it.
This quote is how I feel about a good book. “The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the road has gone, and I must follow, if I can.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit.
” the human race is not an endangered species but not for lack of trying.” ~Douglas Adams , Last Chance to See
“She preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
“Take some books and read; that’s an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
“Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again. ― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
“I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.”― George R.R. Martin
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
— Annie Dillard (The Living)
“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
“Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you’ve finished just to stay near it.”― Markus Zusak
“We read to know we’re not alone.”― C.S. Lewis
“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”― Garrison Keillor
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”― Jorge Luis Borges
“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.”― Walt Disney
“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”― Maya Angelou
If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em.
It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
both by John Waters (I know, language is salty, but he does have a point).
“The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.” -Terry Pratchett
And
“He asked me if I had an adventurous spirit, and I quickly said yes, so much so that my only regret about being in the Army was that it prevented me from signing on to sail on a Norwegian whaler.
If, at this point, he had said: “Oh, do you speak Norwegian, then?” he would have had me over a barrell.” -George MacDonald Fraser
“What matters isn’t whether or not you’re frightened, but how you behave.”
Raymond E. Feist, Silverthorn (The Riftwar Saga, #2)
You call yourself a free spirit, a ‘wild thing,’ and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”–Truman Capote
“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”- Patrick Rothfuss
Each time you open a book and read it, a tree smiles knowing there is life after death.
Oh, like the Terry Pratchett quote, this one is also about truth, but I think that’s a super important aspect of fiction and the insight we get from reading in the first place. This is from The Things They Carried, a book about the Vietnam War.
“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, The man who never reads lives only one.” this quote by george rr martin
“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”– JHUMPA LAHIRI
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”– ANNA QUINDLEN
“Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.”– TONI MORRISON
Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read.
Mitch Hedberg
“Good books are a hindrance to persisting in stupidity.” – Spanish Proverb
I didn’t know what to expect, so I decided to do what journalists call reporting, academics call research, and normal people call reading.
Eric Weiner
Education is the process of
taking doors off their hinges and
learning to exist in all rooms at once.
Rae Gouirand
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.
It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
– Ray Bradbury
I’d kinda like that to be (eventually) engraved on my headstone, but I expect it’s be too small to read. 😃
This is my email signature:
“There will be moments when you have to be a grown-up. Those moments are tricks. Do not fall for them.” ~Jenny Lawson
“Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.” Terry Pratchett
Optimist: person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness. ~ Mark Twain
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.~ Mark Twain
If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all. ~ Audrey Hepburn
Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dreamed you’d see. ~ Lemony Snicket
Expectation is the place you must always go to before you get to where you’re going. ~ Norton Juster (the Phantom Tollbooth)
Exit, pursued by a bear. ~ Shakespeare (The Winter’s Tale)
“no man’s faculties could be developed, no man’s moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books”
Shelley, The Last Man
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx
When a man writes a drama or a book or preaches a sermon or employs any other method of art, what he really does is to take the events of life out of the accidental, irrelevant, chaotic way in which they happen, and to rearrange them in such a way as to reveal their essential and spiritual relations to one another.
George Bernard Shaw
I love the “Is this a kissing book?” suggestion. 😀 The mouse decal is also adorable!
Imagine a world where we listen to everyone’s stories and learn we are not as different as we are the same.
– Brian Andreas (storypeople.com)
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.
The dark places will always be present, but don’t let that keep you from looking for the light.” tolkin
“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
“It is our choices … that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
“There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.” harry potter
The “dragons can be beaten” quote is sometimes attributed to Chesterton (in fact, in Coraline itself), but it looks like Chesterton probably only said something similar:
—
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
—
(Chesterton, essay “The Red Angel” which appears in the compilation book Tremendous Trifles, which can be read on Project Gutenberg for free, btw.)
Anyway. I love good book quotes (and can’t think of any at the moment); I love citations; I love bookstores. 🙂
I’d been reading modern French novels and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea.
Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye.
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
– Ray Bradbury
One of my favorite quotes from a book is, “Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.” It’s from The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.
“A reader lives many lives. The person who doesn’t read lives but one.”
From The Southern Book club’s guide to slaying vampires.
We’re all stories in the end. Let’s make it a good one.
The 11th Doctor
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” –Groucho Marx
PS – You’re a beautiful human, Jenny, and I appreciate you muchly.
Quotes for days! You’ll not have room in your store! But, I’m giving one anyway. 🙂
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” –Cicero
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
– Douglas Adams
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
– Douglas Adams
” I live in two worlds. One is a world of books. I’ve been a resident of Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina, and strolled down Swann’s Way.” -RORY GILMORE
That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet. -Jhumpa Lahiri
Sleep is good, he said. And books are better. – George R. R. Martin
“If you meet a woman of whatever complexion who sails her life with strength and grace and assurance, talk to her! And what you will find is that there has been a suffering, that at some time she has left herself for hanging dead.”
― Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. My favorite book. It had me from this first line.
“What do you read my lord? Words, words, words …” Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Groucho Marx has been quoted a few times. It is one of my very favorites!
Books are a uniquely portable magic. Stephen King
Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you – Shadow of the Wind. Carlos Ruiz Zafon
“Happiness is to joy as an electric light bulb is to the sun. Happiness always has an object, you’re happy because of something, it’s a condition whose existence depends on external things. Joy, on the other hand, has no object. It seizes you for no apparent reason, it’s like the sun, its burning is fueled by its own heart.”
“Entering into someone else’s mind is always a matter of extreme delicacy,”
“And later on when so many roads open up before you, you don’t know which to take, don’t pick one at random; sit down and wait. Breathe deeply, trustingly, the way you breathed on the day when you came into the world, don’t let anything distract you, wait and wait some more. Stay still, be quiet, and listen to your heart. Then when it speaks, get up and go where it takes you.”
All from “Follow Your Heart” by Susanna Tamaro
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin
“When I was your age, television was called books.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride
I also once saw a t-shirt that said something like: They say you can’t die until you’ve read all the books you own. In that case, I’m going to live forever.
Outside of a book, a dog is a man’s best friend.
Place this quote next to a stuffed dog, and leave the other party of Mark Twain’s quote unsaid… ‘inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read’.
These aren’t famous, or even necessarily about of from a book, but they are just some of my favorite sayings.
Every book is like the T.A.R.D.I.S., innocuous on the outside, bigger on the inside, and able to transport you in time and space.
Don’t be afraid to be open minded, your brain is not going to fall out.
If you must choose between town evils, pick the one you haven’t tried before.
Actually, I can!
“A reader lives a thousand lives.” George R R Martin – The full quote is “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
For the travel section I’ve always loved the quote:
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
Saint Augustine
We’re all mad here.
“You perceive me positively agog with curiosity.” Georgette Heyer
“We are thus the books we have read. Or we are, otherwise, the void that the absence of books has opened in our lives.”
-Tomás Eloy Martínez
Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. (The White Queen) Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
“That’s the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn’t it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.” ― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True.
“That’s the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn’t it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.” ― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True.
Here’s one of my favs (and the truth!):
You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! Books are the best weapon in the world! This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!
The Doctor
“”To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these Posthumous Memoirs”
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (English Edition) – Machado de Assis
“It’s not too late to seek a newer world,” – Martha Grimes, The Knowledge
“”To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these Posthumous Memoirs”
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (English Edition) – Machado de Assis
there is something about the harsh, cruel world we live in that’s very rough on miracles. – The New Ellery Queen
Murder With Puffins by Donna Andrews
“That’s what I like about you,” Michael remarked. “Your finely honed sense of deviousness.”
Do I dare disturb the universe?’ – TS Eliot
“Not all of them will lack discretion, but we’re still in the South. He who shows up at the holiday party or family gathering with the best story wins.”- Ellery Adams, Killer Characters
“A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That is why I read so much.”
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Ooooh, this is so fun! I read through everybody’s contributions. Amazing how many submitted Groucho Marx!
Here are mine:
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
– Ernest Hemingway
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
– George Bernard Shaw
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.
– Paul Dirac
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up
people together to collect wood and don’t assign
them tasks and work, but rather teach them to
long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
An English Professor, Ohio University
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.”
– Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle (1969), chapter 1
“Whenever I see an old woman slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant, and she fell on me? That wouldn’t seem quite so funny.”
-Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
“If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.”
-Anonymous
“Schizophrenia beats being alone.”
-Anonymous
“Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.”
-Russell Baker
“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.”
-Voltaire
“The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they are going to be when you kill them.”
-William Clayton
“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
-Buckminster Fuller
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Jenny, thank you for letting us contribute!! <3
“I love a book that makes me cry.” L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind dont matter and those who matter dont mind.” Dr. Seuss
“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“no strategy ever survived contact with the enemy. Or, in the vernacular, Things Will Go Wrong. Be Prepared.“ The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
“I could understand if you said, ‘That’s like comparing apples and uranium,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with baby wolverines,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with the early work of Raymond Carver,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.’ Those would all be valid examples of profound disparity. But not apples and oranges. In every meaningful way, they’re virtually identical.” Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman
Rarest Blue by Baruch Sterman:
•”Written laws are like spiders’ webs and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.”36 The Scythian philosopher Anacharsis spoke these words 2,500 years ago”
•”But how do you induce snails to shed their inhibitions and overcome their native modesty? Snails, it turns out, aren’t that different from humans; plying them with drugs and alcohol seems to do the trick.”
Oscar Wilde – “In this world, there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
A Motive for Murder, Morgana Best
“I’m only a cat, and I stay in my place… Up there on your chair, on your bed or your face! I’m only a cat, and I don’t finick much… I’m happy with cream and anchovies and such! I’m only a cat, and we’ll get along fine… As long as you know I’m not yours… you’re all mine! (Author Unknown)”
The things that make me different are the things that make me,me: you’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. Winnie the Pooh/AA Milne
“Books! The best weapons in the world!” Doctor Who
Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell. – Charles de Lint
Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell. – Charles de Lint
Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit by Corey Olsen, talking about Tolkien
“He insists on the educational value of good stories dealing with serious issues, with good and evil, recognizing that there are horrible and frightening things in the world. “Children are meant to grow up,” he explains, “and not to become Peter Pans.“.
“What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15:37 flight to Oslo?” –
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
This one will sound familiar, but DNA wrote it before it shows up in Doctor Who
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.“
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night James Runcie
“Others have developed their reserve into a form of refined deceit. It’s why people find the British so intriguing, Geordie. The line between the gentleman and the assassin can be so very thin.”
Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay
“Undergraduates, especially those in their first year, are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult. It is sometimes considered that they are not quite human.”
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” – Edgar Allan Poe
*I think my favourite quote of all time
Oh, also, the little mouse sticker should be at floor level, like a real mouse hole. Kids will ove finding it!
Not a quote but an idea for the No contact Kerbside Delivery, from my husband no less. You would need an opening to the outside and a long handled pizza paddle which you would place the book/s onto and simply post them through the opening when your customer arrives. Voila!
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
“It was a dark and stormy night.” Madeline L’Engle (and many others)
“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Things fall apart; the Centre cannot hold – W. B. Yeats (from the poem The Second Coming) used in many books for me most notably by Stephen King in The Stand
“This is what I do: I drink, I read books, and I know things.” Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones
The Seven Secrets of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist, James Longuski
•You may be searching for a needle in a haystack, but you first must build the haystack
Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, Christopher Moore
•Out came an extraordinarily complex network of plastic, brass, and stainless-steel tubing, which in seconds Kona had assembled into what Quinn thought was either a very small and elegant linear particle accelerator or, more likely, the most complex bong ever constructed.
Mercury Falls, Robert Korea’s
• “I’m not sure it means anything,” said Christine. “To quote one of the minor prophets: ‘You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice; if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.'” “That’s quite profound,” Michelle said. “Is that Habakkuk?” “Rush,” said Christine. “Of course,” said Michelle. “I remember when Lucifer lost that bet to Neil Peart.”
What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, David DiSalvo
•” The latest consensus is that most of us are mentally elsewhere between 30 and 50 percent of our waking hours.”
Ever realised how fucking surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly`
~ @KatieOldham, Twitter
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. (Groucho Marx)
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” –Cicero (A favorite quote of mine, as a fan of books and gardens.)
Although, when I looked it up, the actual translation is: “If you have a garden in your library, everything will be complete.” I think it would be awesome if your bookstore could have a garden, even a tiny one in a pot. You’d love my friend’s invention, the “cemeterrarium.”
I do not have the authors but I had come across these quotes that fit me to a tee and other readers in my family
At times I think to myself ” Drop the book and get stuff done!” Then, I laugh and turn the page.
“One More Chapter…” I whispered, two hours ago
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eyes.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery, _The Little Prince_
Not a quote, but an idea: In KCMO we have a used bookstore in a historic section of town (Prospero’s) in a very old brick building and there are places all over the basement shelves and walls where people write their own graffiti. It’s really quite charming. Might not work in a new place, but maybe there’s a corner or a restroom, or some place like that?
“All knowledge is worth having.”
From Jacqueline Carey’s KUSHIEL’S LEGACY series
“Here’s some advice. Stay alive.”
(Hunger Games)
My absolute favorite quote, to the point where I had a friend translate it into math and then had it tattooed on me, isn’t about books but I think it’s very much about us and you and the vibe for the shop and this blog… “Shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased, thus do we refute entropy.” – Spider Robinson, variations of this appear in a number of his Callahan books
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” – C. S. Lewis
“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.” – Jane Austen
“If you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, write it.” – Beverly Cleary
“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” – Mason Cooley
“Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” – E.B. White
“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” – Terry Pratchett
One I come back to over and over again:
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
Only the children know what they are looking for.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
I can’t wait to come visit and hopefully convince you to carry my little book!
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
-Groucho Marx
The course of true love never did run smooth.
(and)
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended…
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
(Shakespeare, *Midsummer Night’s Dream*)
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
(and)
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, *The Great Gatsby*)
A little bit of nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
(Roald Dahl)
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.
(Nathaniel Hawthorne, *The Scarlet Letter*)
If you are not too long, I will wait for you all my life.
(Oscar Wilde)
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
(Bill Fassett, *My Nepenthe*)
I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.
(Alexandre Dumas, *Count of Monte Cristo*)
Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
(and)
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
(and)
There is no book so bad…that it does not have something good in it.
(Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, *Don Quixote*)
It’s long, but one of my favorites has always been:
“A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations! Shouts of delight and horror as the wonders of the world are discovered or the lies of the heavens are uncovered or the wild adventures of devil-knows-who sent romping out of the pages. A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can’t-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong. It should positively vibrate with laughing at comedies and sobbing at tragedies, it should echo with gasps as decent ladies glimpse indecent things and indecent ladies stumble upon secret and scandalous decencies! A Library should not shush; it should roar!”
– Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
Because to him who ponders well
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of the dim wisdoms old and deep,
That God gives unto man in sleep.
(Yeats)
Sorry for so many… the dead authors in my head were complaining that they weren’t represented enough in this list! 🙂
“It’s not where you go but who you meet along the way. If you’re lucky, you’ll find someone hard to say good-bye to at the end of the journey.” – Banished
“But that’s the thing about adventures – you’re invited to take a chance without knowing the outcome, and all that matters is that you say yes.” – Tom Ryan, Following Atticus
“If we dwell in literature we can have as many lives as we want. Some of them are damned. Some are not. And what we finally encounter, in the end, is ourselves.” – Colum McCann, Forward/Intro to The Dubliners by James Joyce
“All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life it’s in him to live.” Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Adventure without danger is just Disneyland -Douglas Coupland
“The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front.” Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
From the Neverending Story by Michael Ende:
If you have never spent afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger–
If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early–
If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless–
If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won’t understand what Bastian did next.
Might I recommend filtering all of these suggestions by putting a spotlight on authors often given in the dark? Women sci-fi writers, LGTBQ+ writers, BIPOC etc…
… it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.
Jane Austen
“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.” – Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
“Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror. Just keep going; no feeling is final!”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” Robert Heinlein
My mother called me lazy as far back as I can remember. I’ve also always found ways to make the things I don’t want to do easier and take less time. When I read this in a Heinlein book I realized that was me! I’ve worn my ‘lazy’ badge proudly ever since 🙂
“Even on the worst days, there’s the possibility for joy.” – Kate Beckett (Castle)
Not a book quote or a quote about books, but it’s something I hold onto very tightly when I feel the darkness closing in.
Ursula Le Guin, “We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.” in http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/LeGuin-NBA-Medalist-Speech.htm
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Groucho Marx.
Probably not appropriate for your store, but I was just quoting you yesterday.
I think he’d actually taken a hit of acid himself, because he seemed to be melting,
and it’s been my experience that most sober people don’t do that.
– “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir)” by Jenny Lawson
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” Mad Hatter (to Alice): Alice in Wonderland
Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book –Farenheit 451
From Bored Of The Rings by The Harvard Lampoon:
“Do you like what you doth see.” said the voluptuous elf maiden as she provacatively parted the folds of her robe to reveal the rounded glories within.
I was in high school…left an impression on my innocent soul….
“You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be. I had a mother who read to me.”
― Strickland Gillian
You’re in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that’s enough.
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
The most difficult thing to read is time. Maybe because it changes so many things.
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
Like stepping into a fairy tale under a curtain of stars.
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
‘ “Pinup rags aren’t literature, Nav.”
“I read them for the articles.” ‘
Gideon the Ninth — Tamsyn Muir
‘There was a bowl with taps that Gideon knew to be a sink only because she’d read a lot of comics, and an enormous person-sized recess in the ground that she didn’t know what to do with at all.’
Gideon the Ninth — Tamsyn Muir
(For the restroom maybe?)
We read to know we are not alone. C.S. Lewis
“She doesn’t understand what it means to love books so passionately that you would die without them, that you would simply stop breathing, stop existing.” from The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles. I got an advance copy on NetGalley, and that sentence resonated with me SO much!
A bit lengthy but I always swoon a bit when I read these two.
“There were things she’d seen in dreams that she wanted to see again and one of those books, any of them, might lead her back to those visions, and then further on so that she saw marvels while still awake.” Helen Oyeyemi
“A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.” Helen Oyeyemi
‘Keep passing the open windows’
John Irving
The Hotel New Hampshire
Ooh ooh ooh, I’ve been waiting forever for someone to ask my favorite quote. Not about books or reading but the best “hook” to a book ever – “We don’t rent pigs”…
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. To tell the truth I don’t remember much about the book (except that it is good) but I’ve always remembered that first line…
“We still hadn’t learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you’re just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something. Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There’s the little empty pain of leaving something behind—graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There’s the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There’s the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn’t give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There’s the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens. And if you’re very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last—and yet will remain with you for life. Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don’t feel it. Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it’s a big part, and sometimes it isn’t, but either way, it’s part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you’re alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.” White Knight, Jim Butched
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
A Favorite from Elephant & Piggie “The Thank You Book” by Mo Willems is “Thank you for being our reader – Piggie, We could not be “us” without you- Elephant, You are the best- Piggie” A few pages later Piggie sees The Pigeon and says “The Pigeon! Thank you for never giving up”.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in “The Little Prince.” One of the best books ever!
I have a whole note on my phone where I keep a bunch! Here are my faves:
“Everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their life.” Wonder (Palacio)
“Don’t you just adore bookstores?” Angelo asked me. “The smell of old paper and new ideas thrills me every time.” Also Known As (Benway)
“One must be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Clockwork Angel (Clare)
“There is no greater power on this earth than story.” Diviners (Bray)
“Books light a fire – whether it’s a book that’s already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.” Belzhar (Wolitzer)
I have so many of these…
I just read my email about July’s Fantastic Strangelings pick and I LOVED her last book and I am STOKED this is the July pick, so I hurled myself to this page so I could comment on the post where you announced the pick and then realized that that wasn’t a blog post, it was an email, and those aren’t apparently the same thing and the internet is hard. BUT I got to see an amazing pigeon painting, and learned about breeding cantaloupes, so all in all this has just been a great fucking night.
Your scars are beautiful. It means you survived. It means you’re here with me …. Dirty English by Ilsa Madden Mills
I fell for him when he kissed me as if he was poisoned, and I was his only cure. – Falcon by Michelle Heard
(A lot of my highlighted passages from Kindle books wouldn’t be all that appropriate for a leaving around a book store)
I’ve used this with permission when my brother-in-law (non-small cell carcinoma – 2009), aunt (complications from West Nile Virus – 2012) and my late husband (ALS – 2017) passed through the veil. I had originally wanted it for my mum who’s still with us and plans on living to be 112. She’s 83 and HFN (here for now).
“What was life has crumbled. What was form now falls away. Mortal chains unbind, and the soul is lifted free. May you find your way to the ancestors. May you find your path to the gods. May your bravery and courage be remembered in song and story. May your parents be proud and may your children carry your birthright. Sleep and wander no more.” – The D’Artigo Sisters – Delilah, Menolly, Camille – from the book Changeling by Yasmine Galenorn used with Author’s written permission – published June 5, 2007
Sandy/Wynterose
“One can believe in a story without believing it happened” Brandon Sanderson – Oathbringer
“But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.” Jane Austen
“Pretend you’re good at it.”
My brain is blank for deep, meaningful quotes, at the moment.
In fact, what popped in my head was one of my favorite characters, Jenks of The Hollow series by Kim Harrison. In fact, my favorite character is another in this series but…who knows how much room I get here to ramble.
Jenks is a pixie. He works with a witch and a vampire who live in a church. Him and his ginormous family live in the graveyard out back.
He is one cool, bada$$ pixie and has some fun quotes, because, you know, he’s a pixie, entirely different from fairies!
Here are a few with a common theme. And so much like little curses now that I’m checking the list. Yeesh, please delete, if this totally inappropriate.
* For the love of Tink.
* Sweet mother of Tink.
* What in Tink’s knickers.
* Tink’s diaphragm.
* Tink’s titties.
* Tink’s contractual Hell.
* Damn it all to Disneyland.
* Tink knocks your knickers.
* Son of a Disney whore.
* What in Tink’s garden of sin.
* Tink’s little red shoes or thong.
* Dumber than Tink’s dildo.
* Tink’s tampons.
* Tink loves a duck.
* So sweet I could fart fairy balls.
* Before the sun goes nova.
* Poop ice cream cones, do you?
* Pissing on my daisies.
* Worthless as a pixy condom.
* Slicker than snot on a doorknob
And my favorite, “Tink’s a Disney whore.”
But, these would, if used, need to be very, very high up. Not children friendly. Secretly, he probably has Tink envy.
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death. — Robert Fulghum
“The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage.”
Thucydides
“Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”
Grandma Moses
“Do it now. It is not safe to leave a generous feeling to the cooling influences of the world.”
Thomas Guthrie
“My religion is kindness.”
Dalai Lama
“On gray days, when it’s snowing or raining, I think you should be able to call up a judge and take an oath that you’ll just read a good book all day, and he’d allow you to stay home.”
Calvin and Hobbes
Don’t panic, and always know where your towel is. Ford Prefect
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” – Lena Dunham
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglas
“These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” – Roald Dahl
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx
“Careful the tale you tell. That is the spell.” Stephen Sondheim – Children will listen
We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?
11th Doctor, Doctor Who Season 5, Episode 13 The Big Bang
Books! The best weapons in the world!
10th Doctor, Doctor Who Season 2, Episode 2 Tooth And Claw
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this.
Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
“To be well loved is to be free of the evil lurking around the next darkened corner. Every child should know that feeling.”
Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks
~~~
“He stood before the mirror in new bloom, encouraged to hope that his resemblance to his father was not so strong as Aunt Sarah seemed to think.”
Booth Tarkington, Penrod
~~~
“It was as black in the closet as old blood.”
Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce novel
~~~~
“If any of the rest of you fancy being Romeo and Juliet, do remember, they die in the end.”
Caimh McDonnell, Last Orders: A Bunny McGarry novel
~~~
“I once read about a study trying to isolate what factors most brought happiness. After adjusting for health and basic necessities, researchers found it wasn’t money or success or education. They narrowed it to two things: a sense of gratitude and enough sleep.”
Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores
~~~
“She made her mouth smile, and the skin around her eyes bunched up like sweatpants with the drawstring pulled tight.”
Suzy Krause, Sorry I Missed You
~~~
“You’re simply perfect, just as you are.”
Menna van Praag, Men, Money, and Chocolate
~~~
“A novel is not an allegory… It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“A novel is … the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
Lewis Carroll
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Anna Quindlen
A mind needs a book as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge
&
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
George R. R. Martin
– I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo.
– So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
JRR Tolkien
Art is the whisper of history, heard over the noise of time.
&
Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.
Julian Barnes
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Audre Lorde
When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.
Barack Obama
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one –
George R. R. Martin
The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyer – anonymous
Or Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a nap. Explore it and draw your own map – Stephen King
Or When I am gone what will you do? Who will write and draw for you? Someone smarter – someone new? Someone better- maybe you! – Shel Silverstein
These comments are better scrolling than instagram and I’m here for it.
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you- pride and prejudice *chills
So many favorites. Among them:
I realized, through it all, that … in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger, something better, pushing right back.
– Albert Camus
“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’m an optimist, but I’m an optimist who carries a raincoat.
– Harold Wilson
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
– Mary Oliver
Let go or be dragged.
— Zen proverb
Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without words
and never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson
“Until you heal the wounds of your past you will continue to bleed”
– Iyanla Vanzant
If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.
– Maya Angelou
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.
One man’s ceiling; another man’s sky high.
– Jon Bon Jovi
Experience is a brutal teacher. But you learn. My God do you learn.
– C.S. Lewis
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
– Anatole France
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“A man is what he thinks all day long.”
~ Emerson
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
~Alice Walker
“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.”
~ Buddha
Furiously Happy was the first book I read on my kindle in 2015 so my first clipped quote is: ‘clinical depression is a semi regular visitor and anxiety disorder is my long-term abusive boyfriend’ thank you for being you and sharing Jenny
From ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything:’ as the biologist J. B. S. Half and once famously observed: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.”
From ‘When Breath Becomes Air:’ Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just a reflection.
From ‘To Shake the Sleeping Self:’ Read this the way you would receive a long story told over dinner.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. Le Guin
In the end, we’ll all become stories.
Margaret Atwood
Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
Octavia Butler
A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
Madeleine L’Engle
So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.
Philip K. Dick
This book, when I am dead, will be A little faint perfume of me. People who knew me well will say, She really used to think that way.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Also, have you thought about have a a deluxe version of the book club where members get an extra bookish item, like the awesome socks from your recent instagram post, or a facemask, or postcards with your art on them, or bookplates from the shop? I bet you’d have some takers!
“Don’t Panic” The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.” -The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
“A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind.” -The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
“Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.” -When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
(Also for those who haven’t read the Cemetary of Forgotten Books series, HIGHLY recommend. Start with The Shadow of the Wind and enjoy)
“…I’m not into all this academic stuff. Too much analysis. What ever happened to reading a book because you liked it?” – Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them” – Stephen King, Different Seasons
“…windows retain latent images of those who sat at them.” – Lovecraft, The Unnamable
“Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Jenny, if you could have some of the books from the Unseen University Library that are chained down, or a diagram of the L Space of the library, I would totally fan-girl even more than I already am.
Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them. Lemony Snicket
Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. Frederick Douglas
Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks. Dr. Seuss
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. Groucho Marx
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray. Go throw your tv set away. And in its place, you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall. Roald Dahl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Wouldn’t that mouse be reading “Of Men and Mice” ?
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination” – Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
“Humans need fantasy to be human.” Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
“A film, a piece of theatre, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.” Alan Rickman
“A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument…and the occasional bar fight.” J. Michael Strazynski
“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” Ursula Le Guin
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
Roald Dahl
“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert:
A sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue and cleverness.”
Joe Hill~NOS4A2
“Didn’t you know that manuscripts don’t burn?” Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
― Madeleine L’Engle
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L’Engle
“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
“Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint Exupery (The Little Prince)
It’s a long one, but one of my favorites, by George R.R. Martin:
—-
Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?
We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth.
Glad to see you are up and selling books…as much as can be done right now. I cannot think of a favorite quote right now.
Couldn’t find one of my faves by searching.
“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” Oscar Wilde
For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye.
–Curse against book stealers, Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona
Books; helping introverts avoid conversation since 1454.
I’m a bookaholic, and I regret nothing.
My favorite opening line of a book is from John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany:
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew…. or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
When you are almost done with a book and realize there aren’t enough pages left for what needs to happen.
Telling your friends that you have plans, but the plans you made were to stay home and read.
Reading is my superpower.
When I get a little money I buy books, if any is left, I buy food and clothes. Erasmus
I don’t recall the title of the book or the author, but the book is about a women raised primarily by her grandmother, a country healer of sorts (the grandma, not the women), and the grandma would explain dating as “Kissing is ok. Kiss all you want because kissing is nothing but uptown whopping for downtown business.”
“…would it be worth it to you to take a chance?” Tom looked at him, puzzled. Stu was getting ready to try and explain further when Tom said: “Laws, everything’s a chance, isn’t it?” Stephen King, “The Stand”
I wish I lived close so I could come to your bookstore when it opens
Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.
-Bill Watterson
Quote from a book that I’ve always loved… simple and yet vivid.
Ursula K. Le Guin — (Earthsea series)
“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.”—The Creation of Éa
“It’s okay to be different.” Todd Parr
“No book ever ends, when it’s full of your friends.” – Roald Dahl, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me
My favorite book quote ever, and it’s not inspirational or anything, but I read this book for the first time when I was like 14, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
“Ford, you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
“Perspective isn’t permanent, and if you’re not strong enough to question yourself, you’ll be the last to know you’ve lost it.” – Jason Kander from Outside the Wire
What a wonderful slew of responses! My favorite quote is also my lifelong tag line – “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” – Charles Bukowski
“Dear Victor: You make me sick.”
“Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness.” ~Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett.
This isn’t book related necessarily but reminds me both of the times we’re in and the drawing you did awhile ago of the blindfolded woman with candles in her hair reassuring us that we may not see the light we cast but to not doubt it’s effects.
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?” – Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
From Jim Butcher in The Dresden Files series: “The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.”
I think it’s in the first book, Storm Front.
“if a book is well written, I always find it too short.” Jane Austen
You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think. by Dorothy Parker
don’t just a book by its movie
“Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it…yet.” L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
You should neatly etch into a shelf behind some sci-fi books “Burgess Meredith was here” in reference to that Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last. Oh! Or, better yet, if you have a display of reading glasses, that etching would work there too. Unless you think it might encourage more people to carve that they, too, were once “here”…forget I said anything.
“The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul: books.” -Emily Dickinson
“I am simply a book drunkard. Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.” -L.M. Montgomery
“Real luxury is time and opportunity to read for pleasure.” -Jane Brody
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” -Oscar Wilde
“ Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it…yet.” “ L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
“The darkness is all around us. Very few people have the courage to light a candle against it…We are of a kind, Captain, and neither of us is holding a candle against the darkness. Like the unknown and unseen enemy we fight, people like you and me, we are the darkness. In some ways we are more like the things we’re fighting than the people we’re protecting. Granted our motives are better–from our perspective–but we wait in the shadows for our unseen enemy to make a move against those innocents with candles. And by that light we take aim.”
― Jonathan Maberry, The King of Plagues
“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.”
John Burroughs
The water runs dirty while the well is being cleaned – no blame. The I Ching
Lately, this keeps running my through my mind…most likely because of our current situation. It is not your typical quote but I thought I’d share anyway…
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” –Tolkien
I am finding it somehow soothing as well as encouraging….these are crazy times!
💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜
“All this has happened before and it will happen again.” The opening line of Peter Pan by JM Barrie.
“Once you learn to read, you are forever free.”–Frederick Douglass
“We’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one.”–the Eleventh Doctor
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”–Albert Einstein
“I cannot live without books.”–Thomas Jefferson
“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”–C.S. Lewis
“Books! The best weapons in the world!”–the Tenth Doctor
I am stunned these are not here yet:
“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” – Douglas Aadams
“An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
“She reads books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” – Annie Dillard
“Leave me alone, I’m reading…..”
– Heather Feather
I love the painting and the decal and the hidden quotes to treasure hunt around your shop! You have the best ideas ever! I’m so happy you’re doing curbside book pick ups. I wish I lived nearby and/or was able to travel. I’m sending all my best wishes for everyone to survive and thrive and enjoy your bookshop in person or online. I can’t wait for your virtual bookstore tour!
“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
“A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours
“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” –Erasmus
“I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years…but then I went to a library and it was okay.”
— Helen Oyeyemi
Sometimes I am sad when a book ends. Other times my heart swells with joy because in my mind I write the next chapter.
I have a TON of suggestions!
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” –C. S. Lewis
“Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.” –Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter series)
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” –Stephen King
“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.” –Carlos Ruiz Zafon
“I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.” –Gail Carriger
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” –Madeleine L’Engle
“I live in two worlds, one is a world of books.” –Rory Gilmore (The Gilmore Girls)
“Words can create love or hate, tears or smiles, harmony or chaos, war or peace. Choose your words with care.” –Anthony Douglas Williams
“Courage, dear heart.” –The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The mouse doorway reminded me of the fairy doors in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You could add some of those as well! https://www.mlive.com/entertainment/ann-arbor/2015/05/fairy_doors_in_ann_arbor.html
Such a wonderful idea Jenny! I mean , it’s obvious because look at all these great quotes!
I have two:
Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually. Robert Hass
He said it was all in my head
and I said, so is everything
but he didn’t get it. Fiona Apple
In the poetry section, “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” G. K. Chesterton… or the cookbook section?
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” ― Dorothy Parker
“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.”
Madeleine L’Engle
“The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust
If you love something, let it go.
If you don’t love something, definitely let it go.
Basically, just drop everything, who cares.
– BJ Novak “One More Thing”
“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
-Groucho Marx
My favorite quote from a book in the history of ever is this one by G.K. Chesterton: “Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum!” (I’m thinking it could go by a mirror in the bathroom or somewhere like that)
“Treasure this day and treasure yourself. Truly, neither will ever happen again.” – Ray Bradbury
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” – Charles Dickens
You don’t have to be a scientist to be smart- you just have to read! – Don Birchfield
“Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.” – Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
“Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.” – Philip Pullman, Lyra’s Oxford
“Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.” – Philip Pullman
“I’m trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn.”
– Philip Pullman
‘Everyone should have a hobby.’ -Doc Sarvis
(The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey)
“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” ― Mason Cooley
Especially apt during a pandemic
I have two … both from John Waters:
“If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”
― John Waters
“It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.”
― John Waters
I see Dr. Seuss is already well represented here, by my favorite line of his is “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” from “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” It’s a good reminder of your own agency when you’re feeling stuck in a less than ideal situation.
Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.
–Christopher Moore (from Fluke)
You must only find the right word. The Divine Spark is infinite, the path to find it is not. The beginning of the path is the word.
–Christopher Moore (from Lamb)
The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. We finished our lunch in silence.
–Don DeLillo (from White Noise)
Oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world!
–Elizabeth Strout (from Olive Kitteridge)
” ‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,’ said Jojen. ‘The man who never reads lives only one.’ ” -from _A Dance with Dragons_, by George R.R. Martin
Not a book, but I love it anyway:
We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams – Willy Wonka
A child who does not feel wonder is but an inlet for apple pie.
— Iona and Peter Opie, “The Classic Fairy Tales”
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
— Francis Bacon
Wit is educated insolence.
–Aristotle
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
–Buddha
The more that you read,
The more that you know.
The more that you read,
The more places you go.
Dr. Seuss
Book after book, I get hooked every time the writer talks to me like a friend.
-Marc Bolan (Spaceball Ricochet)
Just when I think I couldn’t (platonically) love you more, you go do batshit crazy shit like this and I can’t help myself. I just fall more in love and wish I was in San Antonio!
A few more Catherynne Valente suggestions:
“Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.”
“It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.”
“How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.”
partial lyrics from:
I Am A Rock
By Paul Simon (of Simon and Garfunkel)
…
I am a rock
I am an island
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock
I am an island
And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries
It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.
– Jo Walton (Among Others)
John Waters: If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”
This probably shouldn’t be one of the quotes for tiny children to find. Or maybe it should.
Oh I’m lookin’ for my missing piece
I’m lookin’ for my missing piece
Hi-de-ho here I go
Lookin’ for my missn’ piece
– Shel Silverstein
From a German bookstore (Thalia) tote bag (so idk if it’s copyrighted?):
“Bücher verwandeln Muggel in Zauberer”
It translates to “Books transform muggles into wizards”
I love the sentiment and I love how the German gives you an idea of the meaning, but at the same time hides behind some mystery
“The world is dark, and light is precious
Come closer, dear reader
You must trust me
I am telling you a story”
– Kate DiCamillo (The Tale of Despereaux)
“Solitude and silence are positive gestures.” — Fenton Johnson (At the Center of All Beauty)
“Gentle service is the only true subversion.” — Garret Keizer (Help: The Original Human Dilemma)
“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
We’re not our skin of grime…we’re golden sunflowers inside…
Allen Ginsberg
Books Fall Open
Books fall open, you fall in,
delighted where you’ve never been;
hear voices not once heard before,
reach world on world through door on door;
find unexpected keys to things locked up beyond imaginings.
What might you be, perhaps become,
because one book is somewhere?
Some wise delver into wisdom, wit,
and wherewithal has written it.
True books will venture, dare you out,
whisper secrets, maybe shout
across the gloom to you in need,
who hanker for a book to read.
-David McCord
Tracy Thompson, from “The Beast: A Journey Through Depression” :
The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.”
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Keep passing the open windows” John Irving I think it’s from The Hotel New Hampshire. https://possumscatsthingsgnawingatme.wordpress.com/2020/06/24/squirrel-trends/
Two from the Princess Bride by William Goldman. First the long:
“Don’t you understand anything that’s going on?”
Buttercup shook her head.
Westley shook his too. “You never have been the brightest, I guess.”
“Do you love me, Westley? Is that it?”
He couldn’t believe it. “Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches! If your love were -”
“I don’t understand that first one yet,” Buttercup interrupted. She was starting to get very excited now. “Let me get this straight. Are you saying my love is a grain of sand and yours is this other thing? Images confuse me so – is this universal business of yours bigger than my sand? Help me, Westley. I have the feeling we’re on the verge of something just terribly important.”
***
And the short:
“As You Wish.”
Not a quote about books, but one of my favorites from a poem by Robert Bly: “We are perishable, friends. We are salty, impermanent kingdoms.”
“Time is an Illusion; Lunchtime, doubly so.” Ford Prefect in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
And this snippet of dialog from the same book:
Arthur: What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?
Ford: Ask a glass of water sometime.
The quotes that help me write the daily story of my life:
“You cannot go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are, and change the ending.”
–C.S. Lewis
“You must never feel badly about making mistakes…as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”
–Norton Juster, Phantom Tollbooth
“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.”
–Longfellow
“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise; attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.”
–H.G. Wells
“So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.”
–Vincent Van Gogh
“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
–C.S. Lewis
“Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.”
― Arnold Lobel
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
“A book is a dream you hold in your hands.” – Neil Gaiman
Regarding quotes behind books…I’m not sure how this will be done, but I would recommend NOT putting a quote along a whole shelf behind books or even behind several books. You’ll end up with folks who move the books to see the full quote then don’t reshelve the books. I’d like to think the Nowhere will be entirely visited by Strangelings…but there will probably be normals in there too. The type of people who really want to see the quote probably are the type to carefully reshelve (is reshelve not a word? spellcheck doesn’t like it)…but you don’t want to create a lot of extra work for the staff.
I love this idea!
From the book “Every Word You Cannot Say” by Iain S. Thomas
“Every single life you touch, moves the story forward. And so, if you’re kind, your story becomes part of many stories. But life is not special because of what happens after it’s over. Life is special because life is special. Your story is special.”
“If captured, don’t let them give you to the women.”
–“Stardance”, Spider Robinson
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. – Groucho Marx
For Adults – F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby – “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
For Children – Maurice Sendack, Where the Wild Things Are – “And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”
There are SO MANY quotes here already, so if this one is repeated, I’m sorry. I didn’t have days to sit and read all the comments. 🤷♀️
Also- this one is PG, so I don’t even think you’ll use it, but since it’s one of my favorites, I wanted to include it.
“If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!” -John Waters
You’re welcome. 😂
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”–Charles W. Eliot
“I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in days such as these.” Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
“She had taught them, more by her own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness and vulgarity.” L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
“Sometimes, when we are especially quiet inside, we can hear singing. A voice that sounds like slow thunder and sweet rain.” Patricia Polacco, Chicken Sunday
“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again. – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , Betty Smith
Tired does one of two things-either builds the soul or breaks the heart. Can’t decide which it is right now. All I know is I’m tired.”
Melinda Haynes, Mother of Pearl
Wow, i love this idea and there are so many great quotes here. here are a few more
“Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people – those who find comfort in Literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment and those who find comfort in food.” Elizabeth Goudge – The Little White Horse.
( Although i think i am all 3)
She also said: ” As the world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic, it needs to be reminded that the old fairy ste ee’sories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact occur, and that the blue spring mist that makes an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as street itself” Which is a bit long but very appropriate for right now
Also i am too lazy to type it out but there’s a great paasage about booksellers from her book A city of Bells. Here is a link ti some of it https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/841394-a-city-of-bells
“In five years, the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman. He paused to let this planet-shattering information sink into our amazed brains. – Steel Beach by John Varley
“Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.”
― Pat Conroy
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” Hector in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through it and Other Stories
“A book is a dream you hold in your hand.” – Neil Gaiman
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” Mark Twain
Love that one! So many, you may need to rotate them through!
In case, someday, you have a stuffed shark in the store that needs to share space with a quote from Neil Gaiman.
“I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.”
Coraline sighed. ‘You really don’t understand do you?’ she said. ‘I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted, just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?
neil gaiman, Coraline
“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.” –Helene Hanff
And if you ever decide to do a section of secondhand books (ones you’ve read and annotated as you went should go for extra): “I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.” Helene Hanff
“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library” – Jorge Luis Borges
“The time has come
The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'” – Lewis Carroll
“The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.” –Peter Beagle, ‘The Last Unicorn’
“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame… to maintain this ecstasy is success in life” – Walter Pater from The Renaissance
I would live in San Antonio just so I could volunteer at your bookstore. I wish all stores were as awesome as this one sounds.
“Children see magic because they look for it.” ― Christopher Moore (Lamb)
“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.” —Opening line to Blood Rites by Jim Butcher.
“Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.” – Erin Morgenstern, Night Circus
“I would have written you, myself, if I could put down in words everything I want to say to you. A sea of ink would not be enough.’ ‘But you built me dreams instead.” – Night Circus
“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul.” – Night Circus
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” – Oscar Wilde
“The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space…The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
– Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
“…someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again….” C. S. Lewis
“Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” – Lewis Carroll
“Thank God for books where I can get out of myself and just be in somebody else’s skin for a minute.” –Laurie Anderson
nice
“Are there any fairies there?” asked Emily, wistfully.
“The woods are full of ’em,” said Cousin Jimmy, “And so are the columbines in the old orchard. We grow columbines there on purpose for the fairies.”
Emily sighed. Since she was eight she had known there were no fairies anywhere nowadays; yet she hadn’t quite given up the hope that one or two might linger in old-fashioned, out-of-the-way spots. And where so likely as at New Moon?
“Really-truly fairies?” she questioned.
“Why, you know, if a fairy was really-truly it wouldn’t be a fairy,” said Cousin Jimmy seriously. “Could it, now?”
Emily of New Moon
L.M. Montgomery
‘Outside Styx’s apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, nor would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey – and returned.’
THURSDAY NEXT, A Life in SpecOps (Jasper Fforde)
Heaven must be a place where the library is open is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No, 8 days a week.
Alan Bradley
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert, Letter 1858
Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.
Thomas à Kempis (attributed to) German monk, mystic. The Imitation of Christ, Preface to 1617 ed., inscribed on his picture at Zwoll, Holland, where he is buried.
A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.
Martin Tupper Proverbial Philosophy, Series 1, “Of Reading” (1838).
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts, “Myself” (1931).
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon Essays, “Of Studies”
Books: no batteries required. (from my desk calendar called The Daily Bitch”)
thats a interesting requied book actually
These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.
-Roald Dahl
Don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.
-Also Roald Dahl
“He licked his lips.” Robert Jordan. Trust me this will be a huge hit with the high fantasy crowd. 🙂
my information
The book shop=black hole quote has already been posted numerous times (LOVE!), but I haven’t seen this one yet:
“It didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.” -Terry Pratchett
Full quote: “That was how it worked. No magic at all. But that time it had been magic. And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.”
I’m pretty sure this quote is too long and random to use (unless there’s a hobbies section). It’s a quote that has stuck with me for years, so I guess it must be my favorite.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.” – Robert A. Heinlein
About a book (well stories) “Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too – reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace.”
– Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence
“Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another.”
“ We are all stardust and stories.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
Oscar Wilde. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Whenever you feel bad about yourself,just think how much Arthur Wesley would enjoy meeting you.
No matter how stupid you may feel sometimes,remember that Little Red Riding Hood couldn’t figure out that her “grandmother” was a wolf in drag.
“She’s the exclamation point in the happiest sentence I could ever write.” – Michael Fauder
This is really long-a poem. I Opened A Book by Julia Donaldson
I opened a book and in I strode.
Now nobody can find me.
I’ve left my chair,my house,my road
My town and my world behind me.
I’ve fought a dragon,dined with a king
And dived into a bottomless ocean.
I opened a book and made some friends.
I shared their tears and laughter.
Followed their roads with its bumps and bends
To the happily ever after.
I finished my book,and out I came..
The cloak can no longer hide me.
My chair and my house are just the same.
But I have a book inside me.
“There is a way when the poor are too poor and there is a way when the rich are too rich.” Pearl S Buck, “The Good Earth” (The first was selling something dear to them, including children, and the second was revolution/rioting/looting.)
Not so much a quote as a great webcomic, and the origin of the word “bibliophibian”
http://wondermark.com/442/
From The Hobbit – “may the hair on your toes never fall out.”
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
– Death
(Hogfather, Sir Terry Pratchett)
“…less delicate and more beautiful.”
– A Room With a View
This one has probably already been said but: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” (Cicero)
or: “A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.” (Jo Godwin)
One more. It isn’t about reading, per se, but it always make me think of the places we can go inside a book:
“Perhaps the home I am homesick for is still there, after all.” (Michael Frayn)
I’m so excited for your bookstore! You really have done amazing things, Jenny Lawson!!
thanks for information
From an epigraph to a Laurens van der Post novel: ‘The story,’ said the Bushman prisoner, ‘is like the wind. It comes from a far-off place and we feel it.’
“The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” (attributed to Groucho Marx)
There’s more to life than books, you know
But not much more – Steven Patrick Morrissey
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
“Thou shall not meddle in the affairs of dragons, fore you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup”. Darynda Jones (Charlie Davidson Series)
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…”
– Francis Bacon
There is more to this quote, where he elaborates, but when I was a kid, I had a much-loved poster with just this part of the quote on it, combined with a Sandra Boynton illustration of one of her classical cute, fuzzy creatures sitting on top of a bookshelf, eating a book. I am typically the sort of reader that inhales/swallows books, but there are some books that have such a slow and vivid cadence (can’t think how else describe it), like books by Leah Hager Cohen and Kent Haruf, that they always make me think of this quote, because they are definitely “chewed and digested.”
Too many from one of my favorite books about books – Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
“Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them.”
“Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn’t ask for anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.”
“Sometimes it’s a good thing we don’t remember things half as well as books do.”
“When you open a book it’s like going to the theater, first you see the curtain, then it is pulled aside and the show begins.”
“Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.”
“You know, it’s a funny thing about writers. Most people don’t stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago–they don’t expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.”
“Perhaps there’s another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we’d see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there’s a whole world that goes on – developing and changing like our own world.”
“All writers are insane!”
“She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur’s knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon’s side by the way.”
“The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.”
“Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.”
“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda
“Only in silence the word, only in darkness the light, only in dying, life”
–Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
“Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.”
Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read. -Groucho Marx
“The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.”
– Elizabeth Hardwick
“Adventure calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”
Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Jenny, you need to contact this guy. He has a Pope Mouse that is begging to be in your bookshop! https://www.facebook.com/randomcreationsbyred/?hc_location=ufi
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. -Groucho Marx
If a book is well written I always find it too short. – Jane Austen
“A fragment for my friend–
If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in night”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world! – Dr Who.
“Huge as office blocks, silent as birds, that hung in the air exactly the way that bricks don’t.” – Douglas Adams, Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” [ Douglas Adams, the long dark teatime of the soul.
“Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.” – Douglas Adams – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
– Douglas Adams
*************
I think instead of grouping the animals reading books in an area, that you should scatter them around as another visual scavenger hunt. It could be a contest when you open to see how many people find (add in your miniatures, w/taxidermed animals, etc.). Because you obviously need more.
“The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.”
― Saki
You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.
— John Barton
Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.
— Umberto Eco
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
— Robertson Davies
Just read this yesterday:
I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. – Ta-Nehisi Coates
“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.”
Terry Pratchett
Where do the ducks go when the pond freezes over?
Holden Caulfield – The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
I related to Holden as a kid because like me, he was an odd duck.
great post thanks
You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. ~Paul Sweeney
‘Outside of a book, a dog is man’s best friend; inside of a book, it’s too dark to read.’ – Groucho Marx
“Pretend you’re good at it.”
The printing press: supporting book lovers (and introverts), since 1454.
It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number or lives, in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Louis L’Amour
“The joy of life juts out of me like the Matterhorn, but the pain of life looms over me like Everest.” – Steve Martin The Zig-Zag Woman
I have line tattoos of the Matterhorn (left shoulder) and Everest (right shoulder) to represent it.
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader – Margaret Fuller
Children are made readers on the laps of their parents – Emilie Buckwald
most popular books
A quote from a book I love and need, about the love and need for books. Matt Haig -‘Reasons to stay alive’: “There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.”
In awe of the Nowhere Bookshop, btw! Love, Lucia from Amsterdam
And a suggestion to be written under a shelve so only tiny children can read it, from Astrid Lindgren’s ‘Pippi Longstocking Goes aboard’. “Please ma’am, may a Real Lady’s tummy gurgle? Because if not, I may as well make up my mind to be a pirate straightaway.”
good choice