Bookstores Quotes

“Usually when I enter a bookstore, I feel immediately calm. Bookstores are, for me, what churches are for other people. My breath gets slower and deeper as I peruse the shelves. I believe that books contain messages I am meant to receive. I’m not normally superstitious, but I’ve even had books fall from shelves and land at my feet. Books are my missives from the universe.”

“Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.”

“...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church.”

“those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...”

“Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had “just always been placed there.” The longer he pondered booksellers’ indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. “Thinking about it made me angry,” Josephy wrote in his autobiography, “and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult.”

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

“Your reciept is your library card." -- On what killed the brick and mortar bookstores.”

“Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.”

“Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.”