Bookstores Quotes

“I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.”
― George Carlin

“His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.”
― Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 1

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.”
― Armistead Maupin

“An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”
― Roger Ebert, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

“Opportunity may knock only once but temptation leans on the door bell”
― Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey Speaks: Insights from the World's Most Influential Voice

“I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.”
― Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom

“Life in New York was like being in a giant bookstore: all these trillions of paths and possibilities drawing dreamers into the city's beating heart, saying, I make no promises but I offer many doors.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“You see, bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places.”
― Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book

“The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues, and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges.”
― Nancy Byrd Turner

“Reality doesn’t always give us the life that we desire, but we can always find what we desire between the pages of books.”
― Adelise M. Cullens, Dead Bunnies Make All Eight Of Me Cry

“Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.”
― Albert Mohler Jr.

“For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.”
― Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History

“These places are time machines, spaceships, story-makers, secret-keepers. They are dragon-tamers, dream-catchers, fact-finders, and safe places. They are full of infinite possibilities and tales worth taking home.”
― Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book

“Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.”
― Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book

“To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight--and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth.”
― Lionel Barrymore

“In those days, there was no money to buy books.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.”
― Paul Acampora, I Kill the Mockingbird

“Books are more precious than jewels. She truly believed this. What did a diamond bring you? A momentary flash of brilliance. A diamond scintillated for second; a book could scintillate forever.”
― Veronica Henry, How to Find Love in a Bookshop

“A bookstore is one of the many pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
― Jerry Seinfeld

“Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir

“I did discover that if you're interested in low wages, a bookstore ranks below retail clothing sales, except the hours are worse.”
― Sue Grafton

“We are much more likely to be drawn to a messy bookstore than a neat one because the mess signifies vitality. We are not drawn to a bookstore because of tasteful, Finnish shelves in gunmetal gray mesh, each one displaying three carefully chosen, color-coordinated covers. Clutter -- orderly clutter, if possible -- is what we expect. Like a city. It's not quite a city unless there's more than enough.”
― Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History

“There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something.”
― A. Edward Newton, A magnificent farce and other diversions of a book collector

“When she found the bookstore, she walked inside, then stopped and took a long, happy breath.”
― Jasmine Guillory, By the Book

“She loved that moment when she walked into a bookstore. Books were stacked everywhere, with friendly little signs directing you to local authors or signed copies or bestsellers.”
― Jasmine Guillory, By the Book

“When she finally left the bookstore, it was with two new books in her bag, a smile on her face, and a warm, happy feeling in her chest.”
― Jasmine Guillory, By the Book