Drugstore Quotes

“It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.”

“It is sad that the more 'successful' a neighborhood becomes, the more it gradually takes on a recognizable, common look, as the same banks, drugstore chains and national brands move in.”

“I've been there a thousand years, and I never felt comfortable. Beverly Hills - when I first saw it, I thought they put it up this morning. You got to pack water to get to the drugstore.”

“That spring, Amelia takes Maya to the drugstore and lets her choose any polish color she likes. "How do you pick?" Maya says. "Sometimes I ask myself how I'm feeling," Amelia says. "Sometimes I ask myself how I'd like to be feeling.”

“My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.”

“ "This compound should be available from most good drugstores." I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently............In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace." the author dexcribing life in Hungary in the 1950s under Communist Russian rule.”

“And it seems people should not build houses anymoreit seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms on second floorsunder electric lightswithout shades;it seems there is a lot to forgetand a lot not to doand in drugstores, markets, bars,the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at nightand look through this house and the house does not want to be built”

“I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.”

“All over the city lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. The street lights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lampposts like balloons. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, were festooned about the doorways of drugstores and restaurants--and the famous electric signs of Broadway had come to life with glittering fish, dancing figures, and leaping fountains, all flashing like fire. Everything was beautiful. Up in the deepening sky above the city the first stars appeared white and rare as diamonds.”