Quotes & Sayings About Good Bookstores

Fischer was a good kid but very unsophisticated about anything but chess. It was all chess for him, every waking moment. We'd go down to the Four Continents bookstore and he'd buy any Russian chess material he could get his hands on. He'd learned enough Russian to get the gist of prose and he just absorbed the chess part. — Ronald Gross

If you're at my level and you go to a bookstore, even a good turnout is not that many people. Sometimes it is. But for the most part, it's not a huge turnout. — Joel Stein

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

I'm a good person. I eat pretty well. I work out. I go to bookstores. I save people. For a living. I have better things to do than get hauled in for a medical checkup every week. Have I complained the last few months? Constantly. Was I a good patient? No. What can I say? When your primary care provider is a shadowy government agency, you have to be your own medical advocate. — Chelsea Cain

Physical bookstores will become ever-nicer places to be. They are going to have more sofas, better lattes, nicer people working there. Good bookstores are the community centres of the 20th century. — Richard L. Brandt

What motivates Olympic athletes to train for years for one event - in some cases, for just seconds of actual competition? It's the same thing that kept my friend Pete nosing around old bookstores for years. It's the same thing that makes a person venture out of a comfortable job to start a new business. We see it in the artist who spends day after day in a studio chipping away at a block of stone. Look closely and you'll find it in the shopper who passes up the good deal in search of the best deal. It's one of the things that makes us most human. We consciously pursue what we value. It's not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather, we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, then pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize, and pursue is part of our essential humanness, and it's the essence of ambition. — Dave Harvey

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

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse. — Paul Acampora

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

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

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

Bookstores always remind me that there are good things in this world — Vincent Van Gogh

There's nothing definite yet. Of course, any time you have a book, there's going to be book signings and stuff. We'll do bookstores that handle both audio and video. And some of the stores want to have the CDs available at the same time. So that part looks real good. — Scotty Moore

Bookstores attract the right kind of folk. Good people like A.J. and Amelia. And I like talking about books with people who like talking about books. I like paper. I like how it feels, and I like the feel of a book in my back pocket. I like how a new book smells, too. — Gabrielle Zevin