The Little Paris Bookshop Quotes

We cannot decide to love. We cannot compel anyone to love us. There's no secret recipe, only love itself. And we are at its mercy--there's nothing we can do.

Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you've got those autumn blues. And some...well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful voice. Like a short, torrid love affair.

Loving requires so much courage and so little expectation.

Memories are like wolves. You can’t lock them away and hope they leave you alone.

Perdu reflected that is was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books. They look after people.

Reading—an endless journey; a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind.

With all due respect, what you read is more important in the long term than the man you marry, ma chère Madame.

Do we only decide in retrospect that we've been happy? Don't we notice when we're happy, or do we realize only much later that we were?

Often it’s not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us.

All the love, all the dead, all the people we've known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too.

Books keep stupidity at bay. And vain hopes. And vain men. They undress you with love, strength and knowledge. It’s love from within. Make your choice: book or…

Women tell you more about the world. Men only tell you about themselves.

The trouble is that so many people, most of them women, think they have to have a perfect body to be loved. But all it has to do is be capable of loving—and being loved.

Do you know that there's a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It's called the hurting time, Jean Perdu. It's a bog; it's where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather. Your steps are heavier during that time. Don't underestimate the transition, Jeanno, between farewell and new departure. Give yourself the time you need. Some thresholds are too wide to be taken in one stride.

Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do.

There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies—I mean books—that were written for one person only… A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.

My life is too lonely without fictional people crowding my mind.

Books can do many things, but not everything. We have to live the important things, not read them.

Down south they listen to the sea in order to understand that laughing and crying sound the same, and that the soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy.

To carry them within us - that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we've lost, then...then we are no longer present either.

We are immortal in the dreams of our loved ones. And our dead live on after their deaths in our dreams.

Sometimes you’re swimming in unwept tears and you’ll go under if you store them up inside.

He wanted her to sense the boundless possibilities offered by books. They would always be enough. They would never stop loving their readers. They were a fixed point in an otherwise unpredictable world. In life. In love. After death.

Books aren’t eggs, you know. Simply because a book has aged a bit doesn’t mean it’s gone bad.” There was now an edge to Monsieur Perdu’s voice too. “What is wrong with old? Age isn’t a disease. We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?

A stupid man is every woman’s downfall.

habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do.

Saudade": a yearning for one's childhood, when the days would merge into one another and the passing of time was of no consequence. It is the sense of being loved in a way that will never come again. It is a unique experience of abandon. It is everything that words cannot capture.

Death doesn't matter It makes no difference to life. We will always remain what we were to each other.

Kästner was one reason I called my book barge the Literary Apothecary,” said Perdu. “I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they are apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven’t got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn’t develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion. Or those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.

books, the only remedy for countless, undefined afflictions of the soul.

All of us preserve time. We preserve the old versions of the people who have left us. And under our skin, under the layer of wrinkles and experience and laughter, we, too, are old versions of ourselves. Directly below the surface, we are our former selves: the former child, the former lover, the former daughter.

Fear transforms your body like an inept sculptor does a perfect block of stone...It's just that you're chipped away at from within, and no one sees how many splinters and layers have been taken off you. You become ever thinner and more brittle inside, until eve the slightest emotion bowls you over. One hug, and you think you're going to shatter and be lost.

Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.

Perdu suspected that these small children, listening with eyes wide and in rapt concentration, would one day grow up to need reading, with its accompanying sense of wonder and the feeling of having a film running inside your head, as much as they needed air to breathe.

The bookseller could not imagine what might be more practical than a book,

In the end, I'm only going next door. To the end of the corridor, into my favorite room. And from there, out into the garden. And there I will become light and go wherever I want.

Never listen to fear! Fear makes you stupid.

I need to cry some more. I'll drown if I don't...Sometimes you're swimming in unwept tears and you'll go under if you store them up inside.

Dreams are the interface between the worlds, between time and space.

We turn peculiar when we don’t have anyone left to love.

He calls books freedoms. And homes too. They preserve all the good words that we so seldom use. Leniency. Kindness. Contradiction. Forbearance.

It was said that their purring could patch a pail of broken bones back together and revive a fossilized soul; yet when their work was done, cats would go their own way without a backward glance. They loved without reticence, no strings attached—but no promises either.

Books were my friends,” said Catherine, and cooled her cheek, which was red from the heat of cooking, on her wineglass. “I think I learned all my feelings from books. In them I loved and laughed and found out more than in my whole nonreading life.

But it’s well known that reading makes people impudent, and tomorrow’s world is going to need some people who aren’t shy to speak their minds, don’t you think?

Love is a house. Everything in a house should be used—nothing mothballed or ‘spared.’ Only if we fully inhabit a house, shunning no room and no door, are we truly alive. Arguing and touching each other tenderly are both important; so are holding each other tight and pushing the other away. We must use absolutely every one of love’s rooms. If not, ghosts and rumors will thrive. Neglected rooms and houses can become treacherous and foul….

He had found beneath the sorrow a place where emotion and happiness could live alongside tenderness and the realization that he was lovable after all.

There are women who only look at another woman's shoes and never at her face. And others who always look women in the face and only occasionally at their shoes.

Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you’ve got those autumn blues. And some…well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful void. Like a short, torrid love affair.

The world’s rulers should be forced to take a reader’s license. Only when they have read five thousand—no, make that ten thousand—books will they be anywhere near qualified to understand humans and how they behave. I often felt better, no longer so bad, fake and unfaithful, when Jean read me bits where good people did nasty things out of love or necessity or their hunger for life.

My to-be-read pile sadly would most likely outlive me - though I tried valiantly to catch up with it, I'd never get there. The allure of new books, new writers, characters who beckoned to me would never wane.

...having a child is like casting off your own childhood forever. It's as if it's only then that you really grasp what it means to be a man. You're scared too that all your weaknesses will be laid bare, because fatherhood demands more than you can give.... I always felt I had to earn your love, because I loved you so, so much.

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

As long as she doesn't turn too smart for men For the stupid ones, she will, Madame. But who wants them anyway? A stupid man is every woman's' downfall.

... books are a very recent means of expression in the broad sweep of history, capable of changing the world and toppling tyrants.

And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it...There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long. But it gets better. I know that now.

He had altered his method of matching books to readers. He often asked, "How would you like to feel when you go to sleep?" Most of his customers wanted to feel light and safe. He asked others to tell him about their favorite things. Cooks loved their knives. Estate agents loved the jangle made by a bunch of keys. Dentists loved the flicker of fear in their patients' eyes; Perdu had guessed as much. Most often he asked, "How should the book taste? Of ice cream? Spicy, meaty? Or like a chilled rose?" Food and books were closely related. He discovered this in Sanary, and it earned him the nickname "the book epicure.

It takes only one word to hurt a woman, a matter of seconds, one stupid, impatient blow of the crop. But winning back her trust takes years. And sometimes there isn't the time.

Most people weren’t aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them most.

We are immortal in the dreams of our loved ones. And our dead live on after their deaths in our dreams. Dreams are the interface between the worlds, between time and space.

How strange, thought Perdu, that one laugh can wipe away so much hardship and suffering. A single laugh. And the years flow together and…away.

We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. ...Loving requires so much courage and so little expectation.

a book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.

Time. It rubs the rough edges that hurt us smooth.

It’s amazing how unimpressed people are by being loved when it doesn’t fit in with their plans. Love irks them so much that they change the locks or leave without warning.

Nobody would ever wise up if they hadn’t at some stage been young and stupid.

It was easier to hide behind the cover of my books, and I found happiness there.

The reality of love is better than its reputation.

All right," she said. "Give me the books that are kind to me, and to hell with the men who don't give a damn about me.

What a hideous life he had chosen, how painful was the loneliness he endured because he didn't have the courage to trust someone again. To trust someone entirely because in love there is no other way.

Sanary says that you have to travel south by water to find answers to your dreams. He says too that you find yourself again there, but only if you get lost on the way—completely lost. Through love. Through longing. Through fear. Down south they listen to the sea in order to understand that laughing and crying sound the same, and that the soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy.

In French, instead of saying I miss you, we say tu me manques, which means you are missing from me.

I'll send you a friend request." "You do that, sonny. I'm on the Internet every last Friday in the month, from eleven to three.

I like being alive, even if it's occasionally a real struggle and fairly pointless in the grand scheme of things.

Books keep stupidity at bay.

Kitchen solace—the feeling that a delicious meal is simmering on the kitchen stove, misting up the windows, and that at any moment your lover will sit down to dinner with you and, between mouthfuls, gaze happily into your eyes. (Also known as living.)” RECIPES THE CUISINE of Provence is as diverse as its scenery: fish by the coast, vegetables in the countryside, and in the mountains lamb and a variety of staple dishes containing pulses. One region’s cooking is influenced by olive oil, another’s is based on wine, and pasta dishes are common along the Italian border. East kisses West in Marseilles with hints of mint, saffron and cumin, and the Vaucluse is a paradise for truffle and confectionery lovers. Yet

Beside the sleeping Max, who was curled up like a little boy, knees tucked into his chest, mouth pursed into a surprised pout, lay Sanary’s Southern Lights. Perdu picked up the slim volume. Max had underlined certain sentences in pencil and jotted some questions in the margins; he had read the book as a book ought to be read. Reading—an endless journey; a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind. Max had set out on that journey. With each book he would absorb more of the world, things and people.

Capitano Perduto, I’m a firm believer that you have to taste a country’s soul to understand it and to grasp its people. And by soul I mean what grows there, what its people see and smell and touch every day, what travels through them and shapes them from the inside out.

Secondhand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. Theyd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up on a mountain where the air thinned.

You only really get to know your husband when he walks out on you.

He was overawed by her open, fearless affection. Was this why people liked friendship so much?

It often turns out very differently to how you feared.

Asking questions is an art.

We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?

I became myself when my son died,” he said falteringly, “because grief showed me what’s important in life. That’s what grief does. In the beginning it’s always there. You wake up and it’s there. It’s with you all day, everywhere you go. It’s with you in the evening; it won’t leave you alone at night. It grabs you by the throat and shakes you. But it keeps you warm. One day it might go, but not forever. It drops by from time to time. And then, eventually…all of a sudden I knew what was important—grief showed me. Love is important. Good food. And standing tall and not saying yes when you should say no.

I am the daughter of a tall, strong tree. My timber forms a ship, but it is anchorless, flagless. I set sail for the shade and the light; I drink the wind and forget all ports. To hell with freedom, gifted or seized; if in doubt, always endure alone.

Some fathers cannot love their children. They find them annoying. Or uninteresting. Or unsettling. They’re irritated by their children because they’ve turned out differently than they had expected. They’re irritated because the children were the wife’s wish to patch up the marriage when there was nothing left to patch up, her means of forcing a loving marriage where there was no love. And such fathers take it out on the children. Whatever they do, their fathers will be nasty and mean to them.” “Please stop.” “And the children, the delicate, little, yearning children,” Perdu continued more softly, because he was terribly moved by Max’s inner turmoil, “do everything they can to be loved. Everything. They think that it must somehow be their fault that their father cannot love them. But Max,” and here Perdu lifted Jordan’s chin, “it has nothing to do with them.

When the stars imploded billions of years ago, iron and silver, gold and carbon came raining down. And the iron from that stardust is in us today-in our mitochondria. Mothers pass on the stars and their iron to their children. Who knows, Jean, you and I might be made of the dust from one and the same star, and maybe we recognized each other by its light. We were searching for each other. We are star seekers.

Star salt (the stars’ reflection in a river) Sun cradle (the sea) Lemon kiss (everyone knew exactly what this meant!) Family anchor (the dinner table) Heart notcher (your first lover) Veil of time (you spin around in the sandpit to find you are old and wet your pants when you laugh) Dreamside Wishableness This last word was Samy’s new favorite. “We all live in wishableness,” she said. “Each in a different kind.

Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide from others so as not to vex them. It shows what a couple can be for each other, how they can listen to each other. People who only want to listen to themselves will hate tango.

You’re right, Manon. It is all still there. The times we spent together are immortal, imperishable, and life never stops. The death of our loved ones is merely a threshold between an ending and a new beginning.

He’s short, fat and, objectively speaking, not the most obvious choice of pin-up boy. But he’s smart, strong and he can probably do whatever’s necessary for a life of love. I think he’s the most beautiful man I will ever kiss,’ said Samy. ‘It’s strange that magnificent, good-hearted people like him don’t receive more love. Do their looks disguise their character so well that nobody notices how open their soul, their being and their principles are to love and kindness?

You’re a different person if you’ve been warmed by open fires rather than by central heating as a child, if you’ve climbed trees instead of cycling on the pavement with a helmet on, if you’ve played outside rather than sitting in front of the television.

His father would presumably have signed up without hesitation to the three things that made you really “happy” according to Cuneo’s worldview. One: eat well. No junk food, because it only makes you unhappy, lazy and fat. Two: sleep through the night (thanks to more exercise, less alcohol and positive thoughts). Three: spend time with people who are friendly and seek to understand you in their own particular way. Four: have more sex—but that was Samy’s addition, and Perdu saw no real reason to tell his father that one.

Jeanno, women can love so much more intelligently then us men! They never love a man for his body, even if they can enjoy that too ---- and how." Joaquin sighed with pleasure. "But women love you for your character, your strength, your intelligence. Or because you can protect a child. Because you're a good person, you're honorable and dignified. They never love you as stupidly as men love women. Not because you've got especially beautiful calves or look so good in a suit that their business partners look on jealously when they introduce you. Such women do exist, but only as a cautionary example to others.

It's amazing how close you are to your essential self as a kid, he thought, and how far from it you drift the more you strive to be loved.

The more important a thing is, the slower it should be done.

Shouldn’t we carry on living the same way until the last, because that is what vexes death the most—to see us drinking life to the final draft?

a book is both medic and medicine at once.

Books keep stupidity at bay. And vain hopes. And vain men. They undress you with love, strength and knowledge. It’s love from within.

My books have taken me around the world, but it's time I stepped from the pages, so I can see it for myself

I fell in love with Paris, and its people, and the creative souls who'd made it this way.

The further life advanced, the more protective the elderly were of their good days: nothing should imperil the time they had left.

I don't believe that any question is too big, you simply have to tailor your answers.

Time. It rubs the rough edges that hurt us smooth. Because I tend to forget that, I’ve kept a pebble from every river I’ve ever traveled.

My dear son, when you're a woman and you get married, you enter irreversibly into a supervisory position. You have to keep an eye on everything—what your husband does and how he is. And later, when children arrive, on them too. You're a watchdog, a servant and a diplomat rolled into one. And something as trivial as divorce doesn't end that. Oh no—love may come and go, but the caring goes on.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go out and greet those wonderful creatures and say a few nice words in a language invented by Tolkein. I've practiced, but I sound like Chewbacca making a New Year's speech.

In the river meadows, alders, brambles and wild vines formed a magical jungle, dappled with shimmering, greenish light and spangled with twirling forest particles. Marshy pools lay sparkling among the elderberries and leaning beeches.

On the postcard Perdu wrote Catherine that night were the phrases Max had invented that afternoon so he could present them to Samy at dinner. Samy found them so beautiful that she kept repeating them to herself, rolling their sounds back and forth on her tongue like a crumb of cake. Star salt (the stars' reflection in a river) Sun cradle (the sea) Lemon kiss (everyone knew exactly what this meant!) Family anchor (the dinner table) Heart notcher (your first lover) Veil of time (you spin around in the sandpit to find you are old and wet your pants when you laugh) Dreamside Wishableness

Perdu nodded. 'The trouble is that so many people, most of them women, think they have to have a perfect body to be loved. But all it has to do is be capable of loving -and being loved,' he added. 'Oh, Jean, please tell that to the world,' laughed Samy and passed him the on-board microphone. 'We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. Have you noticed that most people prefer to be loved, and will do anything it takes? Diet, rake in money, wear scarlet underware. If only they loved with the same energy; hallelujah, the world would be so wonderful and so free of tummy-tuck tights.

Between yes and no,” Samy answered. “Difficult question. We don’t generally lie around for days wallowing in our happiness like roast beef in gravy, do we? Happiness is so short-lived. How long have you ever been genuinely happy in one stretch?

A nation that has less than a thousand years of culture to look back on, no myths, no superstition, no collective memories, values or sense of shame; nothing but pseudo-Christian warrior morals, deviant wheat, an amoral arms lobby, and rampant sexist racism”—those were the words of a New York Times article in which he had laid into the United States before leaving the country.

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.

My little big friend Samy left me with one final scrap of wisdom. For once she didn’t shout—she tends to shout. She gave me a hug as I sat there, staring at the sea and counting the colors, and whispered very quietly to me: “Do you know that there’s a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It’s called the hurting time, Jean Perdu. It’s a bog; it’s where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather. Your steps are heavier during that time. Don’t underestimate the transition, Jeanno, between farewell and new departure. Give yourself the time you need. Some thresholds are too wide to be taken in one stride.

Comfort was key, and if you had a good book and a hot drink, what else could you possibly need to make your day any brighter?

You have to dance the things you cannot explain," Perdu said under his breath. "And you have to write the things you cannot express," the old novelist thundered.

This is the only life we have. I want to spend mine with you, but without impeding yours. (One would be truly lucky to find a partner in life who truly felt this way!)

All the love, all the dead, all the people we’ve known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too.” He

We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?’ ‘It’s

the soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy.

The reality of love is better than its reputation

Incidentally, you really can scream with your heart; but it’s incredibly painful.

Knjige znajo marsikaj, vendar ne vsega. Najpomembnejše stvari je treba doživeti. Ne brati.

She was the world breathing.

Anyone who’s good at something is hated—or not loved in any case.

I hope I come back with a new vigor for life. I’m tired of being the same person, half-living, all this waiting for something to happen…I have to make it happen.

I knew life wasn’t like a romance novel, but I still held out hope it could be. Why shouldn’t I strive for more?

I had to remember my life wasn't a romance novel, no matter how much I wanted it to be.

We all live in wishableness,

Often it’s not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us. - Monsieur Perdu

Most people weren't aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them most.

What is wrong with old? Age isn’t a disease. We all grow old, even books. But are you, is anyone, worth less, or less important, because they’ve been around for longer?

We don’t generally lie around for days wallowing in our happiness like roast beef in gravy, do we? Happiness is so short-lived. How long have you ever been genuinely happy in one stretch?

As the grandmother, mother and girl said their good-byes and went on their way, Perdu reflected that it was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books. They look after people.

Because of your love I’m learning to love myself too,” she said one morning when the sea was still a sleepy shade of gray-blue. “I have always taken what life has offered me…but I’ve never offered myself anything. I was never any good at looking after myself.” As he pulled her tenderly to him, Jean thought that he felt the same: he was only capable of loving himself because Catherine loved him.

Yet sometimes it still feels as if I’m sewed up in my own skin, as if I’m living in an invisible box that keeps me in and everyone else out. In such moments even my own voice strikes me as superfluous.

I don't know how many years it's been since I last slept with my husband. I was faithful, stupid and so awfully lonely that I'll gobble you up if you're nice to me. Or kill you because I can't bear it.

He had barred himself from mourning because...because he had never been part of Manon's life. Because there was nobody to mourn with him. Because he was alone, totally alone with the burden of his love.

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.

At lunchtime and in the evening he read aloud to Cuneo while the latter prepared the meals. Cuneo would often request stories by women authors. “Women tell you more about the world. Men only tell you about themselves.

It was time to take the reins of my own life, and do the things I yearned to do. And that included being the boss in every sense of the word. No more was I missing out because things weren’t panning out how I imagined they should.

Second hand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They'd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned. "Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had child-like scrawls on the acknowledgement page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loathe were they to damage their treasure. I loved them all. And I found it hard to part with them. Though years of book selling had steeled me. I had to let them go, and each time made a fervent wish they'd be read well, and often. Missy, my best friend, said I was completely cuckoo, and that I spent too much time alone in my shadowy shop, because I believed my books communicated with me. A soft sigh here, as they stretched their bindings when dawn broke, or a hum, as they anticipated a customer hovering close who might run a hand along their cover, tempting them to flutter their pages hello. Books were fussy when it came to their owners, and gave off a type of sound, an almost imperceptible whirr, when the right person was near. Most people weren't aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them.

Homesickness, for example. In his opinion there are various kinds: a desire for shelter, family nostalgia, a fear of separation or a yearning for love. "The yearning to have something good to love soon: a place, a person, a particular bed.

he or she the main character in his or her life? What is her motive? Or is she a secondary character in her own tale? Is she in the process of editing herself out of her story, because her husband, her career, her children or her job are consuming her entire text?

Perdu wanted Anna to feel that she was in a nest. He wanted her to sense the boundless possibilities offered by books. They would always be enough. They would never stop loving their readers. They were a fixed point in an otherwise unpredictable world. In life. In love. After death.

And when a horse loves us, Jeanno, we deserve that love as little as when a women does. They are superior beings to us men. When they love us, then they are being gracious, for only rarely do we give them reason to love us. I learned that your mother, and she's right. Sad to say, she's right.

You’re searching for me. I’m no longer in the sealed rooms, of course. Look at me! Out here. Raise your eyes, I’m here! Think of me and call my name! None of this is any less real because I am gone. Death doesn’t matter. It makes no difference to life. We will always remain what we were to one another.

People say that Parisians are fiercely competitive about everything, and men charm women with their coldness. Every woman wants to net herself a man and turn his icy defenses into passion. Every woman, especially women from the south. That’s what Daphne says, and I think she’s crazy. Diets obviously make you hallucinate.

We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. Have you noticed that most people prefer to be loved, and will do anything it takes? Diet, rake in the money, wear scarlet underwear. If only they loved with the same energy; hallelujah, the world would be so wonderful and so free of tummy-tuck tights.” Jean

Cinder Slaughterhouse-Five Becoming Mrs. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid Buffalo Before Breakfast (Magic Tree House #18) Magnolia Table The Apothecary A Year in Provence Under the Tuscan Sun House of Spies The Paris Architect The Joy Luck Club Little Dorrit A Man Called Ove Nine Women, One Dress Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

That was the only tragic thing about books: they changed people. All except the truly evil, who did not become better fathers, nicer husbands, more loving friends. They remained tyrants, continued to torment their employees, children and dogs, were spiteful in petty matters and cowardly in important ones, and rejoiced in their victims’ shame.

How long have you ever been genuinely happy in one stretch? Jean considered this. "About four hours. I was driving from Paris to Mazan. I wanted to see my sweetheart, and we'd arranged to meet at a small hotel called Le Siecle, opposite the church. I was happy then. For the whole journey. I sang. I imagined her whole body and I sang to it. "Four hours? That's so terribly beautiful." "Yes. I was happier in those four hours than during the four days that followed. But looking back, I'm happy to have had those four days too." Jean faltered. "Do we only decide in retrospect that we've been happy? Don't we notice when we're happy, or do we realize only much later that we were?" Samy sighed. "That would be really stupid.

Loving or not loving should be like coffee or tea; people should be allowed to decide. How else are we to get over all our dead and the women we've lost?" Cunco whispered dejectedly. "Maybe we shouldn't." "You think so? Not get over it. but...then? What then? What task do the departed want us to do?" That was the question that Jean Perdu had been unable to answer for all these years. Until now. Now he knew. "To carry them within us—that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we've lost, then...then we are no longer present either. " Jean looked at the Allier River, glittering in the moonlight. "All the love, all the dead, all the people we've known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too." He felt an overwhelming inner thirst to seize life with both hands before time sped past even faster. He didn't want to die of thirst, he wanted to be as wide and free as the sea—full and deep. He longed for friends. He wanted to love. He wanted to feel the marks that Manon had left inside him. He still wanted to feel her coursing through him, mingling with him. Manon had changed him forever—why deny it? That was how he had become the man whom Catherine had allowed to approach her. Jean Perdu suddenly realized that Catherine could never taken Mann's place. She took her own place. No worse, no better, simply different. He longed to show Catherine the full expanse of his sea!

«Lo sai che fra la fine e il nuovo inizio c’è un mondo di mezzo? È il tempo ferito, Jean Perdu. È una palude dove si raccolgono sogni, paure e intenzioni perdute. I passi in questo tempo si fanno più pesanti. Non sottovalutare questa stazione di passaggio fra la fine e il nuovo inizio, Jeanno. Datti tempo. A volte le soglie sono così grandi che non si possono superare con un passo solo».

My mother said he didn’t mean it; he just couldn’t express his love. Every time he swore at me and beat me, he was showing his great love for me.” Now Perdu seized his young companion by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said more emphatically, “Monsieur Jordan. Max. Your mother lied because she wanted to console you, but it’s ridiculous to interpret abuse as love. Do you know what my mother used to say?” “Don’t play with those grubby kids?” “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.

Hesse's Stage came to Perdu's mind. Most people were familiar with the first line, of course: "In all beginnings dwells a magic force..." but very few people know the ending: "For guarding us and helping us to live." And hardly anyone realized that Hesse wasn't talking about new beginnings. He meant a readiness to bid farewell. Farewell to old habits, Farwell to illusions. Farewell to a long-expired life, in which one was nothing but a husk, rustled by the occasional sigh.

The gray tomcat with the white priest’s collar enjoyed sharpening his claws on Franz Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog, a fable that analyzes the human world from a dog’s perspective. On the other hand, orange-white, long-eared Lindgren liked to lie near the books about Pippi Longstocking; she was a fine-looking cat who peered out from the back of the bookshelves and scrutinized each visitor. Lindgren and Kafka would sometimes do Perdu a favor by dropping off one of the upper shelves without warning onto a third-category customer, one of the greasy-fingered

Women and horses have a lot in common. Would you like to know what? Fine. Well, if a horse refuses, you've phrased your question wrongly. It's the same with women. Don't ask them: 'Shall we go out to dinner?' Ask: 'What can I cook for you?' Can she say no to that? No, she can't. Instead of whispering instructions to them like you would to a horse - lie down, woman, put your harness on - you should listen to them. Listen to what they want. In fact, they want to be free and to sail across the sky. It takes only one word to hurt a woman, a matter of seconds, one stupid, impatient blow of the crop. But winning back her trust takes years. And sometimes there isn't the time. It's amazing how unimpressed people are by being loved when it doesn't fit in with their plans. Love irks them so much that they change the locks or leave without warning. And when a horse leaves us, Jeanno, we deserve that love as little as when a woman does. They are superior beings to us men. When they love us, then they are being gracious, for only rarely do we give them reason to love us. And that's why it hurts so much. When women stop loving, men fall into a void of their own making.

asleep. “May I write your story?” “Don’t you dare, amico” was Salvatore’s reply. “Kindly come up with your own storia, young Massimo. If you take mine, I’ll have none left of my own.” Max gave a deep sigh. “Oh, okay,” he muttered drowsily. “Do the two of you at least have a couple of words for me? You know, a favorite word or two? To send me to sleep?” Cuneo smacked his lips. “Like milk soufflé? Pasta kiss?” “I like words that sound like the things they describe,” whispered Perdu. His eyes were closed. “Evening breeze. Night runner. Summer child. Defiance: I see a little girl in pretend armor, fighting off all the things she doesn’t want to be. Well behaved and thin and quiet—no way! Lady Defiance, a lone knight against the dark forces of reason.

The sea was the first thing he had found that was large enough to absorb his sorrow. ...Perdu would drift on his back, his feet pointing toward the beach. There, on the waves, with the water spilling through his outspread fingers, he drew up from the depths of his memory every hour he had spent with Manon. He examined each one until he no longer felt any regret that it was past, then he let it go. So Jean let the waves rock him, raise him up and pass him on. And slowly, infinitely slowly, he began to trust. Not the sea, far from it; no one should make that mistake! Jean Perdu trusted himself again. He wouldn't go under; he wouldn't drown in his emotions. And each time he abandoned himself to the sea another small grain of fear trickled out of him. It was his way of praying.

The Venetians catalogue everything, including themselves. ‘These grapes are brown,’ I complain to the young vegetable-dealer in Santa Maria Formosa. ‘What is wrong with that ? I am brown,’ he replies. ‘I am the housemaid of the painter Vedova,’ says a maid, answering the telephone. ‘I am a Jew,’ begins a cross-eyed stranger who is next in line in a bookshop. ‘Would you care to see the synagogue?’ Almost any Venetian, even a child, will abandon whatever he is doing in order to show you something. They do not merely give directions; they lead, or in some cases follow, to make sure you are still on the right way. Their great fear is that you will miss an artistic or ‘typical’ sight. A sacristan, who has already been tipped, will not let you leave until you have seen the last Palma Giovane. The ‘pope’ of the Chiesa dei Greci calls up to his housekeeper to throw his black hat out the window and settles it firmly on his broad brow so that he can lead us personally to the Archaeological Museum in the Piazza San Marco; he is afraid that, if he does not see to it, we shall miss the Greek statuary there. This is Venetian courtesy. Foreigners who have lived here a long time dismiss it with observation : ‘They have nothing else to do.’ But idleness here is alert, on the qui vive for the opportunity of sightseeing; nothing delights a born Venetian so much as a free gondola ride. When the funeral gondola, a great black-and-gold ornate hearse, draws up beside a fondamenta, it is an occasion for aesthetic pleasure. My neighbourhood was especially favoured this way, because across the campo was the Old Men’s Home. Everyone has noticed the Venetian taste in shop displays, which extends down to the poorest bargeman, who cuts his watermelons in half and shows them, pale pink, with green rims against the green side-canal, in which a pink palace with oleanders is reflected. Che bello, che magnifici, che luce, che colore! - they are all professori delle Belle Arti. And throughout the Veneto, in the old Venetian possessions, this internal tourism, this expertise, is rife. In Bassano, at the Civic Museum, I took the Mayor for the local art-critic until he interupted his discourse on the jewel-tones (‘like Murano glass’) in the Bassani pastorals to look at his watch and cry out: ‘My citizens are calling me.’ Near by, in a Paladian villa, a Venetian lasy suspired, ‘Ah, bellissima,’ on being shown a hearthstool in the shape of a life-size stuffed leather pig. Harry’s bar has a drink called a Tiziano, made of grapefruit juice and champagne and coloured pink with grenadine or bitters. ‘You ought to have a Tintoretto,’ someone remonstrated, and the proprietor regretted that he had not yet invented that drink, but he had a Bellini and a Giorgione. When the Venetians stroll out in the evening, they do not avoid the Piazza San Marco, where the tourists are, as Romans do with Doney’s on the Via Veneto. The Venetians go to look at the tourists, and the tourists look back at them. It is all for the ear and eye, this city, but primarily for the eye. Built on water, it is an endless succession of reflections and echoes, a mirroring. Contrary to popular belief, there are no back canals where tourist will not meet himself, with a camera, in the person of the another tourist crossing the little bridge. And no word can be spoken in this city that is not an echo of something said before. ‘Mais c’est aussi cher que Paris!’ exclaims a Frenchman in a restaurant, unaware that he repeats Montaigne. The complaint against foreigners, voiced by a foreigner, chimes querulously through the ages, in unison with the medieval monk who found St. Mark’s Square filled with ‘Turks, Libyans, Parthians, and other monsters of the sea’. Today it is the Germans we complain of, and no doubt they complain of the Americans, in the same words.

Now. It is only now or never. Do it, you coward. Breathe underwater at last.

Who sleeps when the earth is dancing?

Find the path out of the maze! Learn to fly! Vanquish the hound of hell! Succeed and when you wake up, a wish will come true.

A bookseller never forgets that books are a very recent means of expression in the broad sweep of history, capable of changing the world and toppling tyrants. Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, minimum retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.

Perdu reflected that it was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books. They look after people.

The trouble is that so many people, most of them women, think they have to have a perfect body to be loved. But all it has to do is be capable of loving—and being loved,” he added. “Oh, Jean, please tell that to the world.” Samy laughed and passed him the on-board microphone. “We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. Have you noticed that most people prefer to be loved, and will do anything it takes? Diet, rake in the money, wear scarlet underwear. If only they loved with the same energy; hallelujah, the world would be so wonderful and so free of tummy-tuck tights.

If someone left you, you had to answer with silence. She bore the scent of a mixture of oriental spices and the sweetness of flowers and honey. Dreams are the interface between the worlds, between time and space. He calls books freedoms. And homes too. They preserve all the good words that we so seldom use. Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide from others so as not to vex them. Saudade. It is the sense of being loved in a way that will never come again. It is a unique experience of abandon. It is everything that words cannot capture. They say that men who are at one with their bodies can sense and smell when a woman wants more from life than she is getting. Another woman found it incredibly erotic when I backed pate en croute. Aromas do funny things to the soul. Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do. Books can do many things but not everything. We have to live the important things, not read them. It was the season for truffles and literature. The countryside was redolent of wild herbs and glowed in autumnal rust reds and wine yellows.

Мечтите са достатъчно трудни за постигане и без някой да ги стъпква.

You mean what’s it against,

Catherine, today Max understood that a novel is like a garden where the reader must spend time in order to bloom. I feel strangely paternal when I look at Max. Regards, Perduto. Catherine, for three seconds when I woke up this morning I had the insight that you are a sculptor of souls, a woman who tames fear. Your hands are turning a stone back into a man. John Lost, menhir. Catherine, rivers are not like the sea. The sea demands, while rivers give. here we are, stocking up on contentment, peace, melancholia and the glass-smooth calm of evening that rounds off the day in gray-blue tones. I have kept the sea horse you fashioned out of bread, the one with the peppercorn eyes. It desperately needs a companion. In the humble opinion of Jeanno P.

Perdu had discovered another thing above the rivers - stars that breathed. One day they shone brightly, the next they were pale, then bright again. And this had nothing to do with the haze or with the fact that he no longer simply stared at his own feet. It looked as though they were breathing to some never-ending slow, deep rhythm. They breathed and watched as the world came and went. Some stars had seen the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals; they had seen the pyramids rise and Columbus discover America. For them, the earth was one more island world in the immeasurable ocean of outer space, its inhabitants microscopically small.

Paper is patient; authors never are.

Do you know that there's a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It's called the hurting time, Jean Perdue. It's a bog; it's where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather. Your steps are heavier during that time. Don't underestimate the transition, Jeanno, between farewell and new departure. Give yourself the time you need. Some thresholds are too wide to be taken in one stride.

How would you like to feel when you go to sleep?' Most of his customers wanted to feel light and safe.

How should the book taste? Of ice cream? Spicy, meaty? Or like a chilled Rosé?' Food and books were closely related. He discovered this in Sanary, and it earned him the nickname 'the book epicure'.

The mornings were so fresh and innocent that they rendered him speechless with gratitude to be alive.

Fear transforms your body like an inept sculptor does a perfect block of stone... It's just that you're chipped away at from within and no one sees how many splinters and layers have been taken off you. You become even thinner and more brittle inside until even the slightest emotion bowls you over. One hug and you think you are going to shatter and be lost.

Often, as right now, Jean Perdu sits in the farmhouse’s summer kitchen, eyes closed, plucking rosemary and lavender flowers, breathing in this most profoundly provincial fragrance, and writing his Great Encyclopedia of Small Emotions: A Guide for Booksellers, Lovers, and other Literary Pharmacists. He is making an entry under “K.” Kitchen solace—the feeling that a delicious meal is simmering on the kitchen stove, misting up the windows, and that at any moment your lover will sit down to dinner with you and, between mouthfuls, gaze happily into your eyes. (Also known as living.)

Would Cuneo feel at home here?” he asked the cats on his lap. They nuzzled his hand. It was said that their purring could patch a pail of broken bones back together and revive a fossilized soul; yet when their work was done, cats would go their own way without a backward glance. They loved without reticence, no strings attached—but no promises either.

Hesse’s Stages came to Perdu’s mind. Most people were familiar with the first line, of course: “In all beginnings dwells a magic force…” but very few people knew the ending: “For guarding us and helping us to live.” And hardly anyone realized that Hesse wasn’t talking about new beginnings. He meant a readiness to bid farewell. Farewell to old habits. Farewell to illusions. Farewell to a long-expired life, in which one was nothing but a husk, rustled by the occasional sigh.

I became myself when my son died,” he said falteringly, “because grief showed me what’s important in life. That’s what grief does. In the beginning it’s always there. You wake up and it’s there. It’s with you all day, everywhere you go. It’s with you in the evening; it won’t leave you alone at night. It grabs you by the throat and shakes you. But it keeps you warm. One day it might go, but not forever. It drops by from time to time. And then, eventually…all of a sudden I knew what was important—grief showed me. Love is important. Good food. And standing tall and not saying yes when you should say no.” More music. Jean left Marseilles behind. Did I think I was the only one grieving, the only one knocked sideways by it? Oh, Manon. I had no one I could talk to about you.

And finally, he had what his father had called transperception. “You can see and hear through most people’s camouflage. And behind it you see all the things they worry and dream about, and the things they lack.” Every person had a gift, and his happened to be transperception.

What task do the departed want us to do?

To carry them within us—that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we’ve lost, then…then we are no longer present either.

Do you know that there’s a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It’s called the hurting time, Jean Perdu. It’s a bog; it’s where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather. Your steps are heavier during that time. Don’t underestimate the transition, Jeanno, between farewell and new departure. Give yourself the time you need. Some thresholds are too wide to be taken in one stride.

I need to be with Jean because he’s the male part of me. We look at each other and see the same thing.

Saudade”: a yearning for one’s childhood, when the days would merge into one another and the passing of time was of no consequence. It is the sense of being loved in a way that will never come again. It is a unique experience of abandon. It is everything that words cannot capture.

The trouble is that so many people, most of them women, think they have to have a perfect body to be loved. But all it has to do is be capable of loving – and being loved,’ he added.

The world’s rulers should be forced to take a reader’s license. Only when they have read five thousand—no, make that ten thousand—books will they be anywhere near qualified to understand humans and how they behave.

Leaving my books would be like leaving a piece of me behind, just the thought made me catch my breath, as though I'd done something audacious even considering it. I ran my fingers over their covers, murmuring farewells.

The nights by the little bookshop on the Seine, spent with word lovers, and other lost souls, this is for you. Paris swept us up, and made us whole, may we never wander alone no matter where we are.

Here and there, beavers peeked out of the bushes as they hunted for river rats.

One: eat well. No junk food, because it only makes you unhappy, lazy and fat. Two: sleep through the night (thanks to more exercise, less alcohol and positive thoughts). Three: spend time with people who are friendly and seek to understand you in their own particular way. Four: have more sex—but that was Samy’s addition, and Perdu saw no real reason to tell his father that one.

entering into pointless relationships with men, who neglect you anyway, or going on crazy diets because you’re not thin enough for one man and not stupid enough for the next.

I ricordi sono come lupi. Non puoi rinchiuderli e sperare che ti lascino in pace.

Quando Monsieur Perdu quardava i libri, non vedeva solo storie, il loro prezzo e un pronto soccorso per l'anima. Vedeva la libertà su ali di carta.

Lo sai che tra la fine e il nuovo inizio c'è un mondo di mezzo? é il tempo ferito, Jean Perdu. è una palude dove si raccolgono sogni, paure e intenzioni perdute. I passi in questo tempo si fanno più pesanti. Non sottovalutare questa stazione di passaggio fra la fine e il nuovo inizio, Jeanno. Datti tempo. A volte le soglie sono così grandi che non si possono superare con un passo solo.

What task do the departed want us to do?" That was the question that Jean Perdu had been unable to answer all these years. Until now. Now he knew. "To carry them within us―that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we've lost, then . . . then we are no longer present either. . . . All the love, all the dead, all the people we've known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of soul. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too.

Time. It rubs the rough edges that hurt us smooth. Because I tend to forget that, I've kept a pebble from every river I've ever traveled.

Sophie's advice on relationship troubles was a month's mourning for every year the couple had been together, and two months for each year of friendship when friends fell out. And for those who left us for good―the dead―a lifetime, because our love for our dearly departed goes on forever. We miss them until the very last day of our lives.