In those days, there was no money to buy books.

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

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

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.

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.

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

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.

His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.

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.