The Bookshop On The Corner Quotes

Because every day with a book is slightly better than one without, and I wish you nothing but the happiest of days.

I am of the old-fashioned conviction that reading is a pleasure to be carefully guarded at all times

The problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise themselves as awful things.

There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew - apart from, sometimes, music - to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds.

Because every day with a book is slightly better than one without, and I wish you nothing but the happiest of days. Now,

Books had been her solace when she was sad, her friends when she was lonely. They had mended her heart when it was broken, and encouraged her to hope when she was down.

At least books could never let you down.

This particular book felt familiar, like an old friend. The characters drew me into their world, and I blocked out mine for the rest of the afternoon.

Dogs are tremendously good at showing you you don't have to check your phone every two seconds to have a happy life.

I never understand,” he said, shaking his head, “why anyone would go to the trouble of making up new people in this world when there’s already billions of the buggers I don’t give a shit about.

Maybe some people were destined to be alone. But, I reminded myself, you're never alone if you read.

Because life is like that, isn’t it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you’d never do anything ever again. And some people don’t. Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision.

It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career―it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and makes you read it.

It was horribly difficult, she reflected, to have finally found the place you thought of as home, only to realize you were going to have to move on again.

He wished he could prop his fearful self up in a corner like a broom and walk away.

Be silent, hide away and let your thoughts and longings rise and set in the deep places of your heart. Let dreams move silently as stars, in wonder more than you can tell. Let them fulfill you—and be still.

They were probably reading on their tablets,” said Nina loyally. She loved her e-reader, too. “Yes, I know,” said the man. “But I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see what they were reading or ask them if it was good, or make a mental note to look for it later. It was as if suddenly, one day, all the books simply disappeared.

Time cleaning was less time reading, so I usually just did the minimal amount, and left it for another day, a day that would never come.

There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them.

There's a certain pull books have on a person if they listen hard enough.

The glow in The Perch dimmed, her corner untouched by the blast of light and heat from the hearth across the room, so she asked for a lantern to read by. The kid obliged, and despite the uncomfortable chair and the ache in her leg and the backwater in which she’d been abandoned, she was absorbed. She was transported. She was elsewhere.

If you weren’t an extrovert, if you weren’t shoving yourself out into the open all the time, posting selfies everywhere, demanding attention, talking constantly, people just gazed right past you. You got overlooked.

A nice manner and a level head would surely get you much further. But that didn't cut much with the big cheeses, who liked flakey mission statements and loud, confident remarks.

Ernest Hemingway quote, ‘There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Though my theory was books chose us, and not the other way around.

Dogs are tremendously good at showing you you don’t have to check your phone every two seconds to have a happy life.

Some stories consumed you, they made time stop, your worries float into the ether, and when it came to my reading habits I chose romance over any other genre. The appeal of the happy ever after, the winsome heroine being adored for who she was, and the devastatingly handsome hero with more to him than met the eye tugged at my heart.

Because life is like that, isn’t it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you’d never do anything ever again.

Endlessly welcoming and hospitable, particularly up here. It didn't necessarily mean she belonged, did it?

However, these days everyone holds their stupid smartphone in front of them the entire time in case somebody likes a dog picture on Facebook and they miss it by two seconds...

I just . . . I built him up in my mind so much.” “Too much reading.” “In my head, he was this kind of lost romantic hero.” “He can’t get lost, he drives a train.

Yes! Do you never listen?” “I never listen.” “Okay, well, it’s a good thing I don’t talk much then, isn’t it?

Helping to match people to the book that would change their life, or make them fall in love, or get over a love affair gone wrong. And for the children, she could show them where to dive into a crocodile-infested river, or fly through the stars, or open the door of a wardrobe...

Reading is being in stuff." Ben squinted. "Like actually being there?" "Like actually being there. You plug straight into the writer's brain. It's just you and them. You experience what they experience.

Any bookseller will tell you that, even with 100,000 booksneatly sorted and shelved in a well-lit, warm shop, if you put an unopened box of books in a dark, cold, dimly lit corner, customers will be riffling through it in a matter of moments. The appeal of a box of unsorted, unpriced stock is extroidinary.

Once upon a time when I was young, I had a lovely boyfriend who bought me a hammock and hooked it up on my tiny and highly perilous roof terrace, where I spent many happy hours just rocking and reading, eating Quavers and reflecting on my lovely handsome boyfriend. Then, I married him and we had a bunch of children and a dog and moved somewhere where it rains all the time, and I think the hammock is in storage. This, my friends, is apparently what's known as 'happily ever after'.

Book in bath. Paperbacks are ideal, obviously, and the worst that can happen is you have to dry it out on the radiator (all my children’s handed-down Harry Potters are utterly warped), but I read a lot on my e-reader and I will let you into a secret: I turn the pages with my nose. You may not have been blessed with a magnificent Scots-Italian Peter Capaldi nose like me, but with a bit of practice you should soon find it’s perfectly possible to keep one of your hands in the water and turn the pages at the same time.

In front of the fire If you haven’t got a fire, a candle will do. The one thing I really look forward to as the nights draw in is a big cozy fire and a good book—the longer the better. I love a really, really long novel, a large cup of tea, or glass of wine depending on how close to the weekend we are (or how much I am in the mood to stretch the definition of what constitutes the weekend), and a bit of peace and quiet. A dog helps, too. Dogs are tremendously good at showing you you don’t have to check your phone every two seconds to have a happy life.

There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew - apart from, sometimes, music - to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds.

Some people buried their fears in food, she knew, and some in booze, and some in planning elaborate engagements and weddings and other life events that took up every spare moment of their time in case unpleasant thoughts intruded. But for Nina, whenever reality, or the grimmer side of reality, threatened to invade, she always turned to a book.

She stared into the distance and tried to think, honestly and properly, about her life: up here where it was clearer, and she could breathe, and she wasn’t surrounded by a million people in a great hurry dashing or grabbing or shouting or achieving things in their lives that they plastered all over Facebook and Instagram, making you feel inadequate.

Just do something. You might make a mistake, then you can fix it. But if you do nothing, you can’t fix anything. And your life might turn out to be full of regrets.

You know, on the bus, everyone used to read books. But then they were fiddling on their phones or those big phones, I don't know what they're called.

Some stories consumed you, they made time stop, your worries float into the ether,

You’ve moved an entire country away with a big bunch of books and a van. said Surinder. I already think you are totally stupid.

She would be as kick-ass as Katniss Everdeen, as uncompromising as Elizabeth Bennet, as brave as Hero.

Just do something. You might make a mistake, then you can fix it. But if you do nothing, you can't fix anything. And your life might turn out to be full of regrets.

You know that frustrating feeling of losing the page in your book? You didn't want to go too far ahead and spoil the surprise, and you didn't want to go too far back, so you kind of stagnated and started from a page that didn't seem quite right, but you read it a few times just to convince yourself... That was how I felt about my life. A little lost, I guess you could say.

that seasons would come and go with the clouds passing across the sky, but also that everything would come around again and find itself much as it had been generations ago, in the farms and the rivers and the towering cliffs and the gentle running valleys, where life did not move so fast that there wasn’t time to settle down with a cup of tea and a piece of shortbread and a book.

I never understand," he said, shaking his head, "why anyone would go through the trouble of making up new people in this world when there's already billions of the buggers I don't give a shit about.

Some people buried their fears in food, she knew, and some in booze, and some in planning elaborate engagements and weddings and other life events that took up every spare moment of their time in case unpleasant thoughts intruded. But for Nina, whenever reality, or the grimmer side of reality, threatened to invade, she always turned to a book. Books had been her solace when she was sad, her friends when she was lonely. They had mended her heart when it was broken, and encouraged her to hope when she was down. Yet much as she disputed the fact, it was time to admit that books were not real life.

She had always been dainty, and never quite confident enough to dance where anyone might see. Here, though, nobody cared or noticed. The emphasis wasn't on looking good or being sexy or standing out; it was about hurling yourself into it and dancing as if you didn't have a care in the world, or a worry, or even a thought; it was dancing as catharsis, and Nina very quickly found that she absolutely loved it.

The problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise themselves as awful things. It would be lovely, wouldn’t it, whenever you’re going through something difficult, if someone could just tap you on the shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, it’s completely worth it. It seems like absolutely horrible crap now, but I promise it will all come good in the end,” and you could say, “Thank you, Fairy Godmother.

She stepped forward and grabbed a huge romance Nina adored from the top of the pile. “Look at this! You already have it.” “Yes, I know, but this is the hardback first edition. Look! It’s beautiful! Never been read!

Oh no, she was never elitist. She said that far too many women are the accomplices of cruel, indifferent men. They lie for these men. They lie to their own children. Because their fathers treated them exactly the same way. These women always retain some hope that love is hiding behind the cruelty, so that the anguish doesn't drive them mad. Truth is, though, Max, there's no love there. Max wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.

You can’t save the world, but keep trying in any small way you can.” His mouth lifted at the corners in an almost embarrassed smile. “Such as an old man collecting battered and singed books to keep voices alive.” He set his age-spotted hand on hers, its warmth comforting. “Or finding a story to help a young mother forget her pain.” He removed his hand and straightened. “It doesn’t matter how you fight, but that you never, never stop.

Had a million different tiny things happened. Because life is like that, isn’t it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you’d never do anything ever again.

Nina, I have tried to be patient. I have tried to help when things go wrong and you buy a book and things go well and you buy a book and it rains so you bring home some books and it’s sunny so you get some books. But . . .

She’d read lots of books about people finding new lives, which hadn’t helped her mood either, had made her feel more and more trapped and stuck where she was, as if everyone except her was managing to get away and do interesting things.

Nina had been told regularly since she was a child that she needed more fresh air, at which she would take her book and clamber up the apple tree at the bottom of their tatty garden, away from the car her father was always tinkering with but had never driven in all the years of her childhood—she wondered what had happened to it—and hide there, braced against the trunk, her feet swinging, burying herself in Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl until she was allowed back inside again.

Some people buried their fears in food, she knew, and some in booze, and some in planning elaborate engagements and weddings and other life events that took up every spare moment of their time in case unpleasant thoughts intruded. But for Nina, whenever reality, or the grimmer side of reality, threatened to invade, she always turned to a book. Books had been her solace when she was sad, her friends when she was lonely. They had mended her heart when it was broken, and encouraged her to hope when she was down.

How very strange that someone she had met so briefly, under such extraordinary circumstances, should turn out to be able to pinpoint exactly what she was feeling, and how. Or, rather, take what she was feeling and make her feel so very much better about it.

Some cities in Europe are using every available bit of space to create native gardens meant to feed bees, roadsides and medians, on top of bus stops.” She sighed. “I wish we’d do something like that here. We have plenty of unused corners of land to help bees.

the soothing cadence of somebody reading always had a transformative effect on babies; Griffin’s theory was that children were evolutionarily engineered to listen to stories, because it stopped them from wandering off into the woods and getting eaten by hairy mammoths.

whenever reality, or the grimmer side of reality, threatened to invade, she always turned to a book. Books had been her solace when she was sad, her friends when she was lonely. They had mended her heart when it was broken, and encouraged her to hope when she was down.

Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision. You’ll get somewhere whether you put any effort into it or not. But doing something new is so hard.

And recommend them to other people: books for the brokenhearted and the happy, and people excited to be going on vacation, and people who need to know they aren’t alone in the universe, and books for children who really like monkeys, and, well, everything really. And to go places where I’m needed.

Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision. You’ll get somewhere whether you put any effort into it or not. But doing something new is so hard. And a few things can help.

You know that frustrating feeling of losing the page in your book? You didn’t want to go too far forward and spoil the surprise, and you didn’t want to go too far back, so you kind of stagnated and started from a page that didn’t seem quite right, but you read it a few times just to convince yourself…that was how I felt about my life.

sometimes she felt the world wasn’t built for people like her. Confident, big-personality people like Surinder simply didn’t understand. If you weren’t an extrovert, if you weren’t shoving yourself out into the open all the time, posting selfies everywhere, demanding attention, talking constantly, people just gazed right past you. You got overlooked. And normally she didn’t mind.

Tolstoy, Stendhal and Cervantes, these men follow me around. They stand in dark corners and eye me disapprovingly from beneath supercilious eyebrows. And all because I’ve never got round to reading their blasted, thousand-page, three-ton, five-generation, state-of-a-nation thingummywhatsits. I don’t care. Or rather, sometimes I do, and at other times I remember that I’m a tortoise-slow reader and that there’s a pub just around the corner.

But you know when you’re watching a film you feel like you can see what’s happening?” Ben nodded. “Well, that’s one thing. But when you read a book, you feel like you’re in it.” “Like a computer game?” “No. Not like a computer game. Computer games are fun, but you’re still just looking at stuff and pressing buttons. Reading is being in stuff.” Ben squinted. “Like actually being there?” “Like actually being there. You plug straight into the writer’s brain. It’s just you and them. You experience what they experience.

Sumire and I were very alike. Devouring books came as naturally to us as breathing. Every spare moment we’d settle down in some quiet corner, endlessly turning page after page. Japanese novels, foreign novels, new works, classics, avant-garde to bestseller – as long as there was something intellectually stimulating in a book, we’d read it. We’d hang out in libraries, spend whole days browsing in Kanda, the second-hand bookshop Mecca in Tokyo. I’d never come across anyone else who read so avidly – so deeply, so widely, as Sumire, and I’m sure she felt the same.

And the stupid thing was, even with everything that had happened, up here in the peace and the wilds of the great valleys and deep lochs of Scotland she had found something that suited her, that soothed her soul: a peace and quiet, a feel for the landscape that she’d never known before, for gentle husbanding and wild creatures, and a sense that things didn’t have to change; that skyscrapers didn’t have to be thrown up in minutes for foreign investors; that seasons would come and go with the clouds passing across the sky, but also that everything would come around again and find itself much as it had been generations ago, in the farms and the rivers and the towering cliffs and the gentle running valleys, where life did not move so fast that there wasn’t time to settle down with a cup of tea and a piece of shortbread and a book.

Precollege program orientation was scheduled for two days after Watson arrived, and I discovered a few things in the meantime. 1. My uncle Leander has a memory like a steel trap. He took Watson and I to the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet around the corner from our flat, to the antiquarian bookshop to look at first editions of Faulkner, to the teahouse painted to look like a starry night, all of which Watson had mentioned in passing that he loved, and whose repetition now left Watson in a state of expansive joy. 2. I should have found this delightful. I did not. As, throughout all of this, Leander referred to Watson as my boyfriend. 2b. Loudly. 2c. He did this as often as he could. 2d. To wit: "A latte for my niece and her young man"; "Charlotte, wasn't that your Jamie's favorite, A Light in August? Faulkner's later work -"; "Child, go and get your boyfriend another napkin, we aren't barbarians/" And then that smile Leander had, something like a wolf after eating a fat peasant child.

A Kiss Before Dying is a gritty suspense story told with great élan—rarity enough, but what is even more rare is that the book (written while Levin was in his early twenties) contains surprises which really surprise . . . and it is relatively impervious to that awful, dreadful goblin of a reader, he or she WHO TURNS TO THE LAST THREE PAGES TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT. Do you do this nasty, unworthy trick? Yes, you! I’m talking to you! Don’t slink away and grin into your hand! Own up to it! Have you ever stood in a bookshop, glanced furtively around, and turned to the end of an Agatha Christie to see who did it, and how? Have you ever turned to the end of a horror novel to see if the hero made it out of the darkness and into the light? If you have ever done this, I have three simple words which I feel it is my duty to convey: SHAME ON YOU! It is low to mark your place in a book by folding down the corner of the page where you left off; TURNING TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT is even lower. If you have this habit, I urge you to break it . . . break it at once!

Write me a story, Kitt,” she whispered, kissing his brow, the hollow of his cheek. His lips and his throat, until she felt like love was an axe that had cleaved her chest open. Her very heart was beating in the air. “Write me a story where you keep me up late every night with your typing, and I hide messages in your pockets for you to find while you’re at work. Write me a story where we first met on a street corner, and I spilled coffee on your expensive trench coat, or when we crossed paths at our favorite bookshop, and I recommended poetry, and you recommended myths. Or that time when the deli got our sandwich orders wrong, or when we ended up sitting next to each other at the ball game, or I dared to take the train west just to see how far I could go, and you just so happened to be there too.” She swallowed the ache in her throat, leaning back to meet his gaze. Gently, as if he were a dream, she touched his hair. She smoothed the dark tendrils from his brow. “Write me a story where there is no ending, Kitt. Write to me and fill my empty spaces.” Ronan held her gaze, desperation gleaming in his eyes. An expression flickered over his face, one she had never seen before. It looked like both pleasure and pain, like he was drowning in her and her words. They were iron and salt, a blade and a remedy, and he was taking a final gasp of air.

The Heart Shattered Glass was a courageous scream from the abyss from an abandoned woman, written in four days from the side of a precipice down which she was hurling all her worldly goods, one at a time, meditating on their meaning. It had taken the world by storm with its candor and wit. The fact that the author had subsequently fallen madly in love with and married the book’s publicist had only prolonged its popularity, but it was truly a book that deserved its worldwide fame. It was . . . She got it exactly. Exactly what it feels like. Nina looked at the tightly buttoned-up woman she had struggled to connect with and marveled, not for the first time, at the astonishing amount of seething emotion that could exist beneath the most restrained exterior. To look at Lesley you would think she was just a middle-aged shopkeeper quietly going about her business. The fact that she completely and utterly empathized with an American woman who had let her own blood drip down a mountainside in anguish, who had changed sexuality and howled at the moon with a wolf pack, just went to show. There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew—apart from, sometimes, music—to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds.

This book is the property of Annie Jeffrey. If this be borrowed by a friend, quite welcome shall he be to read, to study, to not lend but to return to me. Not that imparted knowledge doth diminish learning, but books I find often lent return to me no more. Read, understand what you read, and return in due time with the corners of the leaves not turned down.

The Heart Shattered Glass

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. VOLTAIRE

There was a universe inside every human being, just as big as the universe outside them.

In this corner of ours, we celebrate our favorites, but we have fun with them, too. Because if you can't have fun with what you love, then what's the point?

In the past, she used to live by mantras like passion and willpower, as if by imprinting the words on her mind, they would somehow breathe meaning into her life. Then one day she realised it felt like she was driving herself into a corner, and she resolved never to let those words dictate her life again.

You’re getting happy.

Time cleaning was less time reading, so I usually just did the minimal amount, and left it for another day, a day that would never come. Whistling as I dusted, it occurred

Maybe some people were destined to be alone. But, I reminded myself, you’re never alone if you read.

HAILED AS the twentieth century’s ‘prince of expositors’, G. Campbell Morgan was a messenger widely used by God. However, he wrestled with the integrity of Scripture early in his life. He concluded that if there were errors in the biblical message, it could not be honestly proclaimed in public as God’s holy, inerrant Word. Here is the account of how young Campbell Morgan finally concluded that the Bible was surely God’s Word. At last the crisis came when he admitted to himself his total lack of assurance that the Bible was the authoritative Word of God to man. He immediately cancelled all preaching engagements. Then, taking all his books, both those attacking and defending the Bible, he put them all in a corner cupboard. Relating this afterwards, as he did many times in preaching, he told of turning the key in the lock of the door. ‘I can hear the click of that lock now,’ he used to say. He went out of the house, and down the street to a bookshop. He bought a new Bible and, returning to his room with it, he said to himself: ‘I am no longer sure that this is what my father claims it to be – the Word of God. But of this I am sure. If it be the Word of God, and if I come to it with an unprejudiced and open mind, it will bring assurance to my soul of itself.’ ‘That Bible found me,’ he said, ‘I began to read and study it then, in 1883. I have been a student ever since, and I still am (in 1938).’1

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

It's as if you pull something around yourself, make yourself look smaller and more insignificant. Than you already are." Nina blinked. "Like you don't want anyone to notice you.

... found herself thinking how useful that would be, to have an automatic comforting device. The dog looked nice.

She realized suddenly that despite all the new exciting feelings - of autonomy of freedom - that she'd felt since she arrived, she'd been missing the simple familiarity that came with ... well, someone you understood, she supposed.

There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew—apart from, sometimes, music—to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds.

Because life is like that, isn’t it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you’d never do anything ever again. And some people don’t. Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision. You’ll get somewhere whether you put any effort into it or not. But doing something new is so hard. And a few things can help. That

Some of my happiest childhood memories were formed in the public library that was almost on the corner of our street, a facility that played no small part in inculcating in me an almost irrational love of books. I already own more books than I could ever read, yet I often still go to bookshops just to look at, browse and smell the pages of a freshly printed one – sadly nerdy, I know.

But sometimes she felt the world wasn’t built for people like her. Confident, big-personality people like Surinder simply didn’t understand. If you weren’t an extrovert, if you weren’t shoving yourself out into the open all the time, posting selfies everywhere, demanding attention, talking constantly, people just gazed right past you. You got overlooked. And normally she didn’t mind.

Poetry is good for people who are in strange lands,” said Marek. “Yes,

If you weren’t an extrovert, if you weren’t shoving yourself out into the open all the time, posting selfies everywhere, demanding attention, talking constantly, people just gazed right past you. You got overlooked. And normally she didn’t mind.

Because life is like that, isn’t it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you’d never do anything ever again. And some people don’t. Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision. You’ll get somewhere whether you put any effort into it or not.

But doing something new is so hard. And a few things can help.